ASP.NET WebForms has a feature where the Session ID, normally stored in a cookie, is stored in the request URL path instead. This was done back in 1999-2001 to support extremely rudimentary HTTP clients which did not support HTTP Cookies - imagine really prototypical mobile-phone web-browsers or hastily-written shell scripts using CURL.
Fortunately it was disabled by default and the documentation describes why it's a bad idea to use it - and I understand the business reasons for including it - however this design does not break things like multiple-tab browsing: that's just what happens when you have any stateful web-application, regardless of framework.
It's now gone in ASP.NET MVC (where you gave full control over rendered URLs), so that horrid chapter has ended.
What's being described above isn't simply template-based rendering
The GP didn't supply a link as an example. It is simply a non-specific anecdotal remark, with no further evidence provided.
> The bizarre practice of assigning session keys to visitors and somehow storing the page they're viewing in the server instead of in the URL is pretty common in Brazilian government, which is dominated by Java programmers.
Having dealt with such a service just today (King County Recorder's Office public records search) that behaves in this manner, I felt pretty familiar with what I was describing.
It is entirely possible I'd misapprehended the situation, but as it's an informal conversation on the internet about bad web development practices, I'm going going to dwell on it too much.
I don't know how could anyone think I was talking about general template rendering (but maybe I expressed myself badly, English is not my first language).
It is not Java-specific, but it is common to a few specific Java frameworks as well as at least one of Microsoft's older frameworks (I forget which one).
The vast majority of frameworks (including most modern Java frameworks) do the sane thing and keep application state on the server side (often in a database, as you describe) and UI state on the browser side, which allows links and forms to work the way links are generally supposed to work.