I had a similar strategy when building early web apps with jQuery and ExtJS (but using the URL hash before the History API was available). Just read from locati

I had a similar strategy when building early web apps with jQuery and ExtJS (but using the URL hash before the History API was available). Just read from location.hash during page load and write to it when the form state changes. For more complex state (like table layout), I used to save it as a JSON object, then compress and base64 encode it, and stick it in the URL hash. Gave my users a bookmarklet that would create a shortened URL (like https://example.com/url/1afe9 https://example.com/url/1afe9) from my server if they needed to share it.