"hitting refresh"

You made my day. I totally agree with you: state, state management, UX/UI.

I am extremely proud that I lately implemented exactly this: What if... you pass a link or hit reload - or back button in browser.

I have a web app that features a table with a modal preview when hitting a row - boy am I proud to have invested 1 hour in this feature.

I like your reasoning: it ain't a technical "because I can dump anything in a url", nope, it is a means to an end, the user experience.

Convenience, what ever. I have now a pattern to put in more convenience like this, which should be pretty normal.

The only think that remains and bothers me is the verbose URL - the utter mess and clutter in the browser's input field. I feel pain here and there is a conflict inside me between URL aesthetics and flatter the user by providing convenience.

I am working on a solution, because this messy URL string hurts my eyes and takes away a little bit the magic and beauty of the state transfer. This abstract mess should be taken care of, also in regard to obfuscation. It ain't cleanly to have full-text strings in the URL, with content which doesn't belong there.

But I am on it. I cannot leave the URL string out of the convenience debate, especially not on mobile. Also it can happen that strings get stripped or copy & paste accidentally cut of parts. The shorter the better and as we see, convenience is a brutally hard job to handle. Delicate at so many levels, here error handling due to wrongly formatted strings, a field few people ever entered.

My killer feature is the initial page load - it appears way more faster, since there are no skeletons waiting for their fetch request to finish. I am extremely impressed by this little feature and its impact on so many levels.

Cheers!