
Immutable URLs - swombat
https://medium.com/strong-opinions-lightly-held/91925a8c9373
======
JeremyBanks
Freenet's Content Hash Key URIs are one example of this idea in practice.

<https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Content_Hash_Key>

BitTorrent's "magnet" URIs could be seen as another. I always liked the idea
of using torrents to host static web content. There are downsides, but they
would be worth it in many cases.

If you used the torrent info hash as the primary identifier of the web
content, but also embedded an HTTP URL that the data could be served directly
from, you could have secure immutable content with the almost the same
performance as a regular website. The torrent data could be used to verify the
HTTP data, and the browser would fall back to download from the torrent
network if the website was unavailable or served invalid content.

(This would probably require a bit of original design, since I don't think
there's an existing convention for getting the actual torrent data over HTTP
instead of from peers (DHT), but that's minor.)

~~~
eksith
Yes, the article is basically talking about turning the web into something it
currently isn't. In a strange way, this was what the web was when it was very
young; a bunch of inter-linked documents written in static HTML that rarely
moved around.

But now we have something of a hodgepodge bazaar. For URLs to truly not move
around and survive the creator and his/her circumstances, there needs to be a
distributed repository. I don't know if Freenet will be that repository (the
one time I tried it, it was glacially slow). Maybe Bittorrent's Sync project
will pave the way to create a truly universal, persistent, content repository
with permanent URI(L)s.

~~~
derefr
> I don't know if Freenet will be that repository (the one time I tried it, it
> was glacially slow).

Freenet is only slow because of all the indirection it needs to do to
guarantee anonymity. You could get the same distributed-data-store semantics
"in the clear" for a much lower cost, and then layer something like Tor on top
of them if you wanted the anonymity back.

------
herghost
This cuts against the nature of real life.

I regularly speak with groups of high school pupils about privacy and one of
my main points to them is that once they commit their latest brain-fart to the
internet, there is a very real chance that it becomes immutable - should it go
viral, for instance. If it were absolutely guaranteed that it would become
immutable though, that would be a game changer.

Can you imagine if everything that you had ever said at any point in your life
was permanently journaled and indexed and searchable? I personally find that
to be a horrific concept from a privacy point of view.

From a purely technical point of view I can see the benefit of this idea - I
hate it when an old article that I've bookmarked doesn't exist anymore (even
when by article I mean, a gif that made me chuckle) but seriously, there's a
very different world to a newspaper article being permanently available and a
myspace profile, Facebook post or tweet being there forever.

~~~
gojomo
I wonder if it is better to warn the young about the potential permanence of
online expression... or let them take those risks, and then as they grow,
manage the world that results.

They might negotiate new norms, of forgiveness and understanding towards prior
selves.

------
Osmium
Sounds lovely in theory...

I have to say, a service I would love would be a website that mirrors content
but only if the original source went down, and otherwise redirects to the
original site. Imagine something like a URL shortener, but the URL it gives
you will redirect to a cached copy of the original page in the event that the
original page disappears. That way, you can link and give credit to the people
who made the content, but if something happens it isn't lost from the internet
for good. It would, in a sense, be a "permanent URL" service. It'd be great
for citations too, e.g. wikipedia, academia, etc. I'm not sure if that's what
the OP is getting at here, or if he's suggesting something else?

Either way, too bad rights issues would probably stop something like that ever
being made.

~~~
clarkm
W3C's Permanent Identifier Community Group maintains <https://w3id.org/> which
performs a similar service.

~~~
neilc
Does anyone know the current status of this effort? I love the idea, but the
mailing list has no activity and I didn't see any evidence that w3id URLs are
currently usable.

------
skrause
Thinking of the first content I published on the web as a teenager some 15
years ago, I'm happy it's gone now.

~~~
Teapot
Sure. But wait, you might change your mind in the future. Nostalgia perhaps.

------
edwintorok
"A cool URI is one which does not change."
<http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI>

~~~
jackalope
Once upon a time, I drank this koolaid, but no more. Many things in life are
ephemeral, including information. To suggest that a webmaster's responsibility
is to hoard data for eternity is both scatological and counterproductive. As
the Web matures, it is threatened far more by the growing mountain of obsolete
information that must be ignored in order to find anything timely and
relevant. I would much rather see these pages deleted if they aren't going to
be updated, even if it means broken URIs, which will eventually fade away.

~~~
derefr
I think people have been confused for a long time about what the Cool URIs
essay means by "change".

This is a particular _resource_ :

    
    
        http://example.com/latest/
    

It has _representations_ that change over time, because the conceptual
resource "the latest thing at example.com" itself changes over time. This is
perfectly fine: the _resource_ that the URI refers to stays the same, but that
resource's _state_ is mutable, and the changes in this state are reflected by
changes in the resource's representation (what you get by retrieving it.)

This is another resource:

    
    
        http://example.com/2012/01/02/news/
    

This representation at this resource probably shouldn't change _very much_ ;
not nearly as much as the one at /latest/. It's still allowed to be mutable,
though! If there's a typo, or a retraction, you're allowed to reach back
through time and fix that resource, to make it "the way it should have been"
at that date.

A webmaster's responsibility is to make sure his URLs continue to refer to the
same things they originally referred to. Conceptually, if you only want to
store "the latest news", then you should only have a /latest/, and not a
/2012/01/02/news/. Creating the latter is creating a promise that it will
stick around, continuing to refer to "the news at 2012-01-02"--a _permalink_ ,
in the real sense.

~~~
mkingston
I think another important aspect of this is that the (relatively unchanging)
resource at /2012/01/02/news/ shouldn't be moved to /archive/2012/01/02/news/
without at least a redirect.

The point being that if the resource still exists, the old URI would
preferably still point to it. If you, as the arbiter of the resource, decide
to remove it, of course the URI will break.

------
hobs
This is basically the idea that Julian Assange was putting forth in that
article a few weeks ago about his secret meeting with Larry Paige.

Its interesting to see that people are already saying this is a bad idea but
was praising his version of it.

------
yottabyte47
Seems like a bad idea. People think that once something is on the internet
it's there forever but that's simply not the case. Hard drives develop errors,
servers get shut down, backups get corrupted, etc. etc. Your stuff may be
around for a long while but there's no guarantee that it will be permanently
accessible. If you want the contents of a web page to be available to you then
download said page to your computer and do proper backups, etc. This will
increase the likelihood that said data will survive. This is not a problem
with URLs.

------
jankins
Sounds like the same kind of idea from this Assange interview - he presents an
idea for a naming system where something's name (url) is intrinsically tied to
its content: [http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-
Schmidt?noca...](http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-
Schmidt?nocache&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews)

------
chewxy
Didn't Julian Assange suggest this? There was an interview published last week
with Eric Schmidt, where this was suggested.

I've since started work on a side project that does this - to be integrated
into Fork the Cookbook - since our target audience seems to be very up-in-arms
about original recipes.

------
gphil
I've had this thought before but it seems like the natural key for a web
resource has to be the URL (location) plus the time that the resource was
accessed for practical reasons.

Pages are expected by the end user to change over time, but they also expect
to access them at the same location each time.

~~~
derefr
> I've had this thought before but it seems like the natural key for a web
> resource has to be the URL (location) plus the time that the resource was
> accessed for practical reasons.

These are called Dated URIs/DURIs: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-masinter-
dated-uri-10>

No browser currently implements them, but a viable resolution mechanism
probably involves keeping a default store of Memento Time-Gates
(<http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/quick-intro/>) and querying them to see if
any of them have a copy of your resource for that date.

------
bowietrousers
This is a cute, facile idea, but not thought through. It's not a problem of
technology per se - content itself doesn't want or need to live forever. I
reserve the right to alter or remove content that I publish.

It's trendy to think of the web as completely stateless, distributed etc, but
the reality is that it's not. The state of resources changes over time because
the world changes - and URIs are only around to reflect that.

The problem with HTTP is that you mostly can't tell the difference with a 404
between 'It's not there (and was never there)' and 'It's not there (but used
to be, and has gone away)'. Servers should send a 410 to reflect that.

------
felipelalli
After that I thought: I _have_ to reinvent the web someday. Another engine,
another software, not even called "web". The web structure is so old-fashion.
Did you already think about how much different a page is from each other? It
is bad for the final user! Think again: Android, Windows, Mac, the SO usually
try to make a standard to help user don't think again to make repetitive
tasks. Different layouts makes an unnecessary brain effort. I know that this
is the beauty anarchy from web, but it is not practical. It is possible to be
beautiful and follow minimum standards. iPhone is there to prove that.

------
adregan
It's very interesting that an immutable web could make current real world
immutable objects (printed books, etc.) appear more flexible, more mutable.
With a book, you can write in the margins of a particular copy, every copy
could be lost, but a distributed system of permanent content would persist
without marginalia or utter destruction.

The web is amazing because of its participatory potential and it's archival
abilities. What might be more interesting than simply having immutable content
is palimpsested content where the original object always exists beneath
additional changes and additions.

------
alberth
"Immutable URLs" already exist, they're called URNs [1] and it's a standard
since 1997.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Name>

~~~
dvanduzer
A URN is still a pointer. An ISBN is not the book.

~~~
alberth
"Immutable URLs " Is a poor headline then.

It should read instead as "immutable content" since the OP intends to never
have the _content_ a URL points too to never be lost or changed

------
alexpopescu
URIs are pretty much immutable. My impression is that what the OP suggests is
a guaranteed lifetime of the content associated with the URI.

As for this second part, "once it's published it should always remain out
there", I'm not very sure it's a good idea. In many cases I'd actually like to
be able to say that a piece of content has expired (the content is not
relevant anymore).

------
gojomo
There's an interesting proposal for a 'duri' URI scheme, that means "what this
URI was at this date":

<http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-masinter-dated-uri-07.html>

It doesn't actually freeze the contents... but it provides a language/key for
talking about permanent URI+content bindings.

------
dvanduzer
This reminds me of Van Jacobson's Google Talk several years ago:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZMoY3q2uM>

Basically a sketch of if the entire HTTP-based web worked like bittorrent.

------
georgebashi
The memento project (led by Herbert Van de Sompel) attempts to solve some of
this: <http://www.mementoweb.org/>

------
aklemm
If there aren't enough interested readers to encourage a maintainer to keep
the content available, is it really worth the effort to auto-archive all of
it?

