The HTML5 History API gives developers the ability to modify a website’s URL without a full page refresh. This is particularly useful for loading portions of a page with JavaScript, such that the content is significantly different and warrants a new URL.
Here’s an example. Let’s say a person navigates from the homepage of a site to the Help page. We’re loading the content of that Help page with Ajax. That user then heads off to the Products page which we again load and swap out content with Ajax. Then they want to share the URL. With the History API, we could have been changing the URL of the page right along with the user as they navigate, so the URL they see (and thus share or save) is relevant and correct.
#The Basics
To check out the features of this API it’s as simple as heading into the Developer Tools and typing history into the console. If the API is supported in your browser of choice then we’ll find a host of methods attached to this object:
