> "AJAX Crawling" is great, but the hash trick has been used with AJAX long before this to provide back button support in AJAX-heavy websites.
> Before this technique was widespread, it was all too common to hit "Back" and be taken to the previous website you'd viewed, even if you'd viewed more than one page on the original site.
Uh yes, the original poster of the question is aware of that:
> As far as I can recall, earlier this year it was just a normal URL-fragment-like string (starting with #), without the exclamation mark.
His question was not about the hash, but specifically about the shebang.
> Before this technique was widespread, it was all too common to hit "Back" and be taken to the previous website you'd viewed, even if you'd viewed more than one page on the original site.
Uh yes, the original poster of the question is aware of that:
> As far as I can recall, earlier this year it was just a normal URL-fragment-like string (starting with #), without the exclamation mark.
His question was not about the hash, but specifically about the shebang.