Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)
210 points - yesterday at 2:32 PM
SourceComments
It's amazingly many news sites that also seem to scrub their URLs every time they do a redesign. Also uncool.
$ curl -I https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1998/nsf9814/nsf9814.htm
HTTP/2 404
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
content-length: 54737
date: Sun, 09 Aug 2026 17:58:44 GMT
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; includeSubdomains; preload
server: ApacheSo to a large extent this has been mitigated and not using the suggestion here, which is to create a permanent URL ontology upfront
That said eventually neglect, removal, reorgs (or simply websites going offline) still happens... but the way the suggested goal has been advanced is due to becoming a business priority and with redirects and CMSes as tech to help
That said one suggestion made here turned out to be very useful and indeed is the default in WP:
http://www.w3.org/1998/12/01/chairs
> A reason for using a topic area as part of the URI is that responsibility for sub-parts of a URI space is typically delegated, and then you need a name for the organizational body - the subdivision or group or whatever - which has responsibility for that sub-space. This is binding your URIs to the organizational structure. It is typically safe only when protected by a date further up the URI (to the left of it): 1998/pics can be taken to mean for your server "what we meant in 1998 by pics", rather than "what in 1998 we did with what we now refer to as pics."
You can even make an orphan branch and check out that branch into `dist/` as a worktree to keep it under version control.
I usually bookmark a link only to come back to a few days/weeks later. I don't expect a bookmark to work after years. I let the URL owners to have freedom to change it.
A thing that changes or goes away, feels natural. An URL that didn't change in 20 years, actually freaks me out, like a non-degradable plastic.
But today is not that, it is the opposite of that with stuff being put online that really doesn't need to be. This is permaweb vs slopweb.
Unfortunately I'll never know for sure.
When I worked for an ecommerce website, we spent weeks making sure every URL worked after a migration.
Nowadays it feels a little quaint because most of my 404s are from LLMs hallucinating URLs that never existed, sometimes for topics I never covered. I wonder what nonsense it attributes to me.
archive.org perhaps have/could have some interesting insights on it.