“It’s not about the hashbang.”

Ben Cherry nails the essence of the recent hash-bang controversy:

The hashbang is in the unfortunate position of being the messenger of a big change that’s been slowly occurring on the Web in the past few years, and will only continue to pick up steam: many Web domains are now serving desktop-class applications via HTTP, instead of traditional Web sites. For instance, twitter.com is no longer a collection of Web pages that represent a Web site, but is simply an application that you happen to launch by pointing a browser at http://twitter.com*. This has many wide-reaching implications, and the hashbang is merely a side-effect. In this way, the hashbang is an easy-to-hate straw-man, whereas the real debate to be had is about this shift towards applications.