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I've seen now that some urls use exactly this combination of symbols in urls: #!

E.g: facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/?sk=messages

Or twitter:

http://twitter.com/#!/myusername/following

Is this just coincidence or something more interesting? Does anyone have an idea or even knows what they are used for?

Saludos, Sacha

Shoe
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Bosh
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    [What's the Shebang in Facebook and new Twitter URLs for?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3009380/whats-the-shebang-in-facebook-and-new-twitter-urls-for) (Aside: Not that it's actually acting as a shebang here, that's just the title of the question) – eldarerathis Nov 01 '10 at 21:59

2 Answers2

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Yes, its a proposal from Mozilla foundation for a search extension to the URL format.

See more here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragment_identifier

David Mårtensson
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    I don't think that's what it is in the context of the OP's examples, though. It's the Google proposal right below it. Otherwise there would be another `!` and some text between/after them. – eldarerathis Nov 01 '10 at 22:05
  • Might be, did not see that one, but its probably one of those anyway ;) – David Mårtensson Nov 01 '10 at 22:09
  • And it makes sense to inform about an ajax state.... Thanks for that info! Interesting stuff... Bookmarked ;-) – Bosh Nov 01 '10 at 22:43
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It shouldn't have any special meaning for the URL. Anything after the # isn't sent as part of the GET request.

This is something that can be read by JavaScript on the page, though, and allows them to use AJAX to reload the main content of the page w/o doing a complete new page load.

pioto
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