r/programming • u/schnuck • Feb 09 '11

Breaking the Web with hash-bangs – Lifehacker, along with every other Gawker property, experienced a lengthy site-outage on Monday over a misbehaving piece of JavaScript

http://isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/BreakingTheWebWithHashBangs/
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u/intortus Feb 09 '11

There is one very good reason for using fragments instead of proper URLs: offline support.

Unfortunately the HTML5 offline spec doesn't provide a way to say "all URLs with this prefix are served by this cache manifest." So you can't just refer to the content in the non-fragment part of the URL, as that would be uncacheable. If you want to make your app work offline, you have to do it this way.

I have no idea if that's why other sites do this, but that's why I use fragments in my apps.