Have you looked at intercooler (http://intercoolerjs.org http://intercoolerjs.org)? I do not typically work on front end stuff and I know very little about the

Have you looked at intercooler (http://intercoolerjs.org http://intercoolerjs.org)? I do not typically work on front end stuff and I know very little about the ecosystem but I recently used intercooler to build a pretty simple site with some AJAX stuff going on and it worked really well for me. At least the way I did it, it fits your criteria since my pages are fully rendered by the server (django in my case) for the initial request. It seems orders of magnitude simpler than something like Angular and I assume it's correspondingly less capable, but depending on your use case it seems like it might be a good fit. edit: another guy in here suggested something called "jQuery-Pjax" which intercooler is possibly "inspired by" and very similar to, and if that's true then I can recommend jQuery-Pjax as well.