TECH Signal 474
Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)
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Illustration only Photo by Parsoa Khorsand on Unsplash
Tim Berners-Lee's 1998 essay argues that URIs should be designed to be permanent, and that most reasons for changing them are avoidable with proper planning and server configuration.
For engineers, this is a foundational principle of web architecture: URI stability is a design decision, not a technical constraint. Breaking URIs by reorganizing sites or exposing implementation details creates dangling links that harm users and the web's integrity. The essay offers practical guidance, like separating URI space from file layout and keeping metadata, that remains directly applicable to modern web services.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
URIs do not change on their own; people change them, often due to redesigns or reorganizations that could have been avoided.
Exposing implementation details such as 'cgi-bin' or file extensions in URIs makes them fragile and likely to break when the mechanism changes.
The solution is to treat URIs as an abstract, stable space mapped to actual resources, and to plan for persistence from the start by keeping metadata and using server flexibility.
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