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Asked: 2026-05-26T17:41:36+00:00

Background I’m working on a an educational JavaScript application/site (SPA) that will eventually have

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Background

I’m working on a an educational JavaScript application/site (SPA) that will eventually have 1000s of dynamic urls that I’d like to make crawlable.

I’m now researching how to implement versioning, routing and seo (and i18n).
My general idea is to use hashbangs and have resources like:

example.com/#!/v1?page=story1&country=denmark&year=1950

The “page” parameter here decides which controllers/views that need to be loaded and the subsequent parameters could instruct controllers to load corresponding content.

Versioning of parameters could then be handled by just replacing the “v1” part of the url – and have a specific route handler mapping deprecated parameters for each version.

SEO would be improved by having node.js or other backend delivering an “escaped fragment” version of the content.

i18n should probably be handled by node.js as well? This way, what gets delivered to the crawler is already translated?

  1. Is this a viable approach to making a Single-page-application versioned and crawlable?
  2. I’m using Backbone.js now, what would you add to the mix to help out with the above?
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    1) Hell no. (well it could work, but designing your application from the ground up with hashbangs is a bad idea)

    2) node.js and backbone are a good combination. Personally I like express for routing/templating on the server.

    –The argument against hashbangs:There is so much good information on the web that I will defer to them.

    here: http://isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/BreakingTheWebWithHashBangs

    here: http://www.pixelflips.com/blog/do-clean-urls-still-matter/

    and this wonderful library: https://github.com/browserstate/History.js/

    and this wiki page from that library: https://github.com/browserstate/history.js/wiki/Intelligent-State-Handling

    Than check out this chrome extension that will ajax StackOverflow(or any other site with normal urls) using that library: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/oikegcanmmpmcmbkdopcfdlbiepmcebg

    Are 15 parameters absolutely necessary? Put the content parameters(page, country) in the url and the presentational (ie: sortby=author) in the query string.

    in response to “You are still stuck with hash tag serialization” I give this:

    every route should point to a valid resource location. ie: /v1/page/denmark/some-slug-for-post should be a resource location and when you change it to a new post/page, that should be a resource location too. What I’m saying is that if you can’t use the url to bookmark the page, than the implementation is broken.

    Also, are you planning on breaking all your links with every version? I’m not sure why you’re including the version in the url.

    I hope this helps.

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