Cool URLs Do Change (Sometimes)

Required reading: Cool URLs don't +change.

When I wrote Nobody Cares About Your +Build, I +set up a dedicated publishing platform - Wordpress, as it happens - to host +it, and as part of that process I put some real thought into the choice of +“permalink” schemes to use. I opted to use a “dated” scheme, baking the +publication date of each article into its name - into its URL - for all +eternity. I'm a big believer in the idea that a URL should be a long-term name +for the appropriate bit of data or content, and every part of a dated scheme +“made sense” at the time.

This turned out to be a mistake.

The web is not, much, like print media. Something published may be amended; +you don't even have to publish errata or a correction, since you can correct +the original mistake “seamlessly.” This has its good and its +bad parts, but with judicious use +and a public history, amendment +is more of a win than a loss. However, this plays havoc with the idea of a +“publication” date, even for data that takes the form of an article: is the +publication date the date it was first made public, the date of its most +recent edit, or some other date?

Because the name - the URL - of an article was set when I first published it, +the date in the name had to be its initial publication date. This has +actually stopped me from making useful amendments to old articles because the +effort of writing a full, free-standing followup article is more than I'm +willing to commit to. Had I left the date out of the URLs, I'd feel more free +to judiciously amend articles in place and include, in the content, a short +amendment summary.

The W3C's informal suggestions on the subject state that “After the creation +date, putting any information in the name is asking for trouble one way or +another.” I'm starting to believe that this doesn't go far enough: every +part of a URL must have some semantic justification for being there, dates +included:

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Each part must be meaningful. While + http://example.com/WW91IGp1c3QgbG9zdCB0aGUgZ2FtZQ== is fairly easy to + render stable, the meaningless blob renders the name immemorable.
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Each part must be stable. This is where I screwed up worst: I did not + anticipate that the “date” of an article could be a fluid thing. It's + tempting to privilege the first date, and it's not an unreasonable + solution, but it didn't fit how I wanted to address the contents of + articles.
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Running a web server gives you one namespace to play with. Use it wisely.

Ok, But I've Already Got These URLs

Thankfully, there's a way out - for some URLs. URLs inherently name +resources accessed using some protocol, and some protocols provide support +for resources that are, themselves, references to other URLs. HTTP is a good +example, providing a fairly rich set of responses that all, fundamentally, +tell a client to check a second URL for the content relevent to a given URL. +In protocols like this, you can easily replace the content of a URL with a +reference to its new, “better” URL rather than abandoning it entirely.

Names can evolve organically as the humans that issue them grow a better +understanding of the problem, and don't always have to be locked in stone from +the moment they're first used.

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