jdMorgan - 1:39 pm on Oct 23, 2009 (gmt 0)

If anyone's contemplating intentionally implementing this technique, be aware that in the context of a click on a text link of the form <a href="url">, only Apple Safari actually sends the fragment identifier to the server. Since Google's Chrome shares part of the same code-base, it may do this as well, but I haven't tested Chrome.

However, IE, Mozilla, Opera, and other members of the 'major' browser families strip the fragment identifier and send only the URL+query string to the server.

And being an old server-side-only Luddite, I also haven't investigated how the fragment identifier is handled by AJAX, or whether the observed browser behavior changes if an exclamation point is appended to the "#" (as recently proposed by Google [webmasterworld.com] to denote AJAX state names).

Jim