Deeplinking backbonejs with pushstate

Question

Not sure what i am missing, but I have pushState working on my Backbone based app, where I could click around and have my URL look like www.example.com/route_specified, however if i try to go directly to that page it shows up as not found. If I do www.example.com/#route_specified it works, and quickly changes back to www.example.com/route_specified on the address bar

I am guessing i need to do something in Apache to handle this and make sure that all calls resolve to the index or something like that, but can't find explanation.

Answer 1

Correct. Think about it this way without pushstate enabled. Your server is still trying to serve the page at that route. Since it cannot find the specified document at that location, it throws a 404.

Technically speaking, your server should still produce some sort of result at the url location, then have Backbone take over. In it's simplest form, this is called progressive enhancement. The server should still serve some sort of static page with critical info, which will eliminate issues you will have with SEO. Work your site/app with javascript disabled, serving only the relevant data. Then have Backbone takeover. I have just come across Mashable's redesign, and they integrate progressive enhancement extremely well with Backbone.

If SEO is not a concern, you could always redirect the user to the index page. Just remember that search engines will only index your app page then. If your content is being served dynamically, there wont be any data to index.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Tyrone