In modern browsers and HTML5, there is a method called pushState on window history. That will change the URL and push it to the history without loading the page.
You can use it like this, it will take 3 parameters, 1) state object 2) title and a URL):
window.history.pushState({page: "another"}, "another page", "example.html");
This will change the URL, but not reload the page. Also, it doesn't check if the page exist, so if you do some JavaScript code which be reacting to the URL, you can work with them like this.
Also there is history.replaceState() which does exactly the same thing, except it will modify the current history instead of creating a new one!
Also you can create a function to check if history.pushState exist, then carry on with the rest like this:
function goTo(page, title, url) {
if ("undefined" !== typeof history.pushState) {
history.pushState({page: page}, title, url);
} else {
window.location.assign(url);
}
}
goTo("another page", "example", 'example.html');
Also you can change the # for <HTML5 browsers, which won't reload the page. That's the way Angular uses to do SPA according to hashtag...
Changing # is quite easy, doing like:
window.location.hash = "example";
And you can detect it like this:
window.onhashchange = function () {
console.log("#changed", window.location.hash);
}