
Tim Berners-Lee: Cool URIs don't change (1998) - vog
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
======
smanek
Funny to think how 'document based' the web was back then. The concept of
webapps must have been completely foreign. I'll bet he _really_ hates URL
shorteners.

Interestingly, the examples he gave of good URIs (e.g.,
<http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1998/nsf9814/nsf9814.htm>) are still working 12 years
later, while the bad ones are broken (e.g., <http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-
bin/pubsys/browser/odbrowse.pl>).

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I miss the document based web. Actually what I miss is the "amateur web". I
remember in 1994, when I first got the internet, typing in "Star wars" and
visiting the many many fansites with random pictures, midi files, fan fiction,
etc. Those sites don't exist any more. Sure, there are still some amateur
sites out there, but they're always pretty professional, not the type done by
complete-amateurs who just want to share something they're passionate about.

Do a Google search for any hobby, fictional universe, sports team and see how
many pages it takes you to find a "geocities" type of site.

~~~
smanek
Tools have been built to help amateurs better share what they want. I
guarantee Tumblr + Posterous + Weebly + fanfiction.net + wikia have far more
'amateur' sites and content on any topic you're interested in, than the entire
internet in aggregate in 1994.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
+1, very good point. The discovering these sites is much harder than in 1994.
Professional sites dominate search to a degree that finding amateur sites
requires much more work.

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radagaisus
I really like the historical note: "Historical note: At the end of the 20th
century when this was written, "cool" was an epithet of approval particularly
among young, indicating trendiness, quality, or appropriateness. In the rush
to stake our DNS territory involved the choice of domain name and URI path
were sometimes directed more toward apparent "coolness" than toward usefulness
or longevity. This note is an attempt to redirect the energy behind the quest
for coolness."

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mise
The best snippet for me: "Think of the URI space as an abstract space,
perfectly organized. Then, make a mapping onto whatever reality you actually
use to implement it."

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thefreshteapot
This is a must read!

Every company I have worked at with legacy sites to port/maintain have yet to
allocate any resources to this problem. No matter how often I suggest it. Now
we have a great reference for our bosses and selling to clients of the
importance of it.

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js2
Also see <http://daringfireball.net/2007/03/blank_slate> and scroll down to
"Yes, even URLs are designed"

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iwwr
One mitigating tactic for websites linking other people's content is to create
a local copy and display that copy if the original content has been removed or
de-linked. Though this may not be 100% kosher copyright-wise.

But speaking of preserving old link structures, would you suggest a strategy
for doing so?

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
On my own blog, I have gone through several movements, either from one
blogging platform to another, or more recently, deciding that I liked
/blog/title/ better than /blog/year/month/title/. In each case, I have been
very careful to ensure that I have a sufficient set of mod_rewrite rules
configured in Apache that any of my old URLs will redirect the user to the new
URL.

In the case of changing structure wholesale, it was as simple as setting up
`RewriteRule ^/blog/\d+/\d+/(.+)$ /blog/$1 [L,R=301]`

In previous cases, I had to get a lot more specific; eg. articles with the
same title would have different generated URLs depending on the blog software,
so I would need to handle that as a redirect as well.

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phil
A classic. This keeps getting more credible as it ages. Now it's been at the
same URI for 13 years.

