Your URL Is Your State
December 4, 2025
This got me thinking: how often do we, as frontend engineers, overlook the URL as a state management tool? We reach for all sorts of abstractions to manage state such as global stores, contexts, and caches while ignoring one of the web’s most elegant and oldest features: the humble URL.
Source: Your URL Is Your State
Well over a decade ago, when developing some tools for exploring then relatively new CSS features like gradients, I hit upon the idea of using URL as a way of maintaining and sharing the state of these tools.
It’s continued to surprise me that more developers don’t do this, so this article on using URLs for state might inspire some to explore more.
