[Kalabasa]

Yeah it's terrible in some use cases.

If only HTML provided a way to navigate <a> without adding a history entry, like <a nohistory href=...>.

If this was a real product i would market it as "Native time travel debugging! Go through your application state as you would go through your browser history!"

[devmor]

That would be terrible UX.

The real answer is that web developers should stop using anchor tags to target non-stateful links and should properly handle navigation to pages that are short lived.

But that battle is a bit like asking people to use their turn signals when merging.

[ComplexSystems]

Could you perhaps modify the iframe to clear the new URL from history using JavaScript?

You could also make it optional; perhaps there'd be syntax like <a href="asdf.html#myElement;no history">...</a> or something.

Probably would be better to make the no history default though.