References — fw-08 A Client-Side Router

Primary sources first. Read the real implementation after you have written yours, never before.

Platform primitives — the whole module rests on these

• HTML Standard — History interface — pushState, replaceState, and the popstate semantics that catch everyone
• Navigation API — the modern replacement: intercepting navigations, transitions, and a real event for all navigations rather than only back/forward. Explainer.
• URL Standard — URL and URLSearchParams; do not parse URLs by hand
• URLPattern — native route-pattern matching, which removes most of a router's parsing code
• Scroll restoration — history.scrollRestoration, the detail every hand-rolled router forgets

Routers to read

• React Router — data loading integrated with routing; read the decision docs
• TanStack Router — type-safe route definitions and search-param handling
• Vue Router · SvelteKit routing

The hard parts

• Nested routes and layout preservation · scroll restoration on back · in-flight navigation cancellation · focus management after navigation (an accessibility requirement, not a nicety) · code-split route loading without waterfalls
• Accessible client-side routing — the user-testing study behind focus-on-navigation guidance

Related modules

• fw-09 — Query cache — route-level data loading is where these two meet
• fe-15 — State taxonomy (planned) — URL as a first-class state location
• fe-24 — Accessibility (planned) — focus management after navigation

When a claim here proves stale, record it in PROGRESS.md section 7.