Don't break history, enhance it

Form submissions aside, if we were to design any modern web application with only hyperlinks, we'd end up with fully functional back/forward navigation.

Consider, for example, the typical "infinite pagination scenario". The typical way it's implemented involves capturing the click with JavaScript, requesting some data / HTML, injecting it. Making the history.pushState or replaceState call is an optional step, unfortunately not taken by many.

And this is why I use the word "break". With the simpler model the web proposed initially, this situation was not in the picture. Every state transition relied on a URL change.

The flip side of this is that new opportunities emerge for enhancing history now that we can control it with JavaScript.