> When a user navigates from the URL bar or from a link on another site the browser requests a specific location from my server. Since I'm already serving the browse HTML it makes sense to render my templates at the same time. It doesn't make sense to send only a generic template and then have the popstate trigger an XHR request for some JSON which gets rendered by a javascript template library. That's extra and unnecessary.
Wait, I might have misunderstood something here: do you mean `popstate` is triggered when users arrive on your site from an other one or from nowhere? On initial loading? As in, it's triggered by navigation between different domains, not just in-domain navigation?
edit: Try checking the `state` attribute of your event object, it should only be set (therefore truthy) for history entries created via pushState, urls being navigated will not have a state.
Yep, I was doing it wrong. You're supposed to pass a state object as the first parameter, I was passing null. So this fixes 2 things, prevents me from having to do XHR on initial page load AND I don't need to do an XHR on back/forward navigation either, I can just use the state object to store my data. Awesome!
Wait, I might have misunderstood something here: do you mean `popstate` is triggered when users arrive on your site from an other one or from nowhere? On initial loading? As in, it's triggered by navigation between different domains, not just in-domain navigation?