AngularJs' choice of a finite state machine places a significant impact on its routing capability.
In traditional websites, most pages would share common sections, such as the header, footer, navigation menu, and side bars. The more complex ones shared more than that - perhaps the site had several pages dedicated to "Games", and several pages dedicated to "Stories". All the "Games" pages would share a certain section, that would not be present in the "Stories" pages. Similarly, all the "Stories" pages would share a certain section, that would not be present in any of the "Games" pages.
In AngularJs, you may apply the ngView directive to a DOM element.
When the URL changes, the router determines the new MVC state of the application,
and the contents of the ngView element are removed,
and rendered using the new MVC state.
Since the router is driven by a finite state machine under the hood,
there can only be one ngView rendered within the application at any time.
This, of course, precludes us from implementing the scenario above,
with the "Games" and "Stories" sections in the scenario described above.
The techniques employed by AngularJs developers to get around this generally fall into in one of two categories:
Some from the AngularJs core team have identified this as a problem, and have drafted this proposal for router design in AngularJs 2.0. It draws inspiration from EmberJs' router, and a few others. Thus, it appears that AngularJs may have support for this in future versions, as there has been a significant community demand for this feature.