When I get my way reviewing a codebase, I make sure that as much state as possible is saved in a URL, sometimes (though rarely) down to the scroll position.
I genuinely don't understand why people don't get more upset over hitting refresh on a webpage and ending up in a significantly different place. It's mind-boggling and actually insulting as a user. Or grabbing a URL and sending to another person, only to find out it doesn't make sense.
Developing like this on small teams also tends, in my experience, to lead to better UX, because it makes you much more aware of how much state you're cramming into a view. I'll admit it makes development slower, but I'll take the hit most days.
I've seen some people in this thread comment on how having state in a URL is risky because it then becomes a sort of public API that limits you. While I agree this might be a problem in some scenarios, I think there are many others where that is not the case, as copied URLs tend to be short-lived (bookmarks and "browser history" are an exception), mostly used for refreshing a page (which will later be closed) or for sharing . In the remaining cases, you can always plug in some code to migrate from the old URL to the new URL when loading, which will actually solve the issue if you got there via browser history (won't fix for bookmarks though).
I genuinely don't understand why people don't get more upset over hitting refresh on a webpage and ending up in a significantly different place. It's mind-boggling and actually insulting as a user. Or grabbing a URL and sending to another person, only to find out it doesn't make sense.
Developing like this on small teams also tends, in my experience, to lead to better UX, because it makes you much more aware of how much state you're cramming into a view. I'll admit it makes development slower, but I'll take the hit most days.
I've seen some people in this thread comment on how having state in a URL is risky because it then becomes a sort of public API that limits you. While I agree this might be a problem in some scenarios, I think there are many others where that is not the case, as copied URLs tend to be short-lived (bookmarks and "browser history" are an exception), mostly used for refreshing a page (which will later be closed) or for sharing . In the remaining cases, you can always plug in some code to migrate from the old URL to the new URL when loading, which will actually solve the issue if you got there via browser history (won't fix for bookmarks though).