HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the protocol that defines the language browsers use to communicate with web servers, is stateless, meaning that after you make a web request and a server sends back a response, no memory of that interaction remains. Websites need other ways to remember previous user interactions to make anything more sophisticated than a static web page work.

These days, Javascript frameworks like Vue.js, React.js, and others let developers create single-page applications (SPAs) that provide statefulness to the otherwise stateless web. Because they’re implemented as Javascript applications running in the user’s browser, they can keep track of what the user has done and render the app in a way that accounts for that shared history. However, the user’s browser