[HN Gopher] Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)
___________________________________________________________________
Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)
Author : bpierre
Score : 90 points
Date : 2021-12-04 18:11 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.w3.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.w3.org)
| Groxx wrote:
| Any favorite strategies for achieving this in practice, e.g.
| across site infrastructure migrations? (changing CMS, static site
| generators, etc)
|
| Personally about the only thing that has worked for me has been
| UUID/SHA/random ID links (awful for humans, but it's relatively
| easy to migrate a database) or hand-maintaining a list of all
| pages hosted, and hand-checking them on changes. Neither of which
| is a Good Solution(tm) imo: one's human-unfriendly, and one's
| impossible to scale, has a high failure rate, and rarely survives
| migrating between humans.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Cool rules of thumb don't run contrary to human behaviour and/or
| rules of nature.
|
| If what you want is a library and a persistent namespace, you'll
| need to create institutions which enforce those. Collective
| behaviour on its own won't deliver, and chastisement won't help.
|
| (I'd fought this fight for a few decades. I was wrong. I admit
| it.)
| derefr wrote:
| People can know what good behaviour is, and not do good; that
| doesn't mean it isn't helpful to disseminate (widely-agreed-
| upon!) ideas about what is good. The point is to give the
| people who _want_ to do good, the information they need in
| order to do good.
|
| It's all just the Golden Rule in the end; but the Golden Rule
| needs an accompaniment of knowledge about _what_ struggles
| people tend to encounter in the world--what invisible problems
| you might be introducing for others, that you won 't notice
| because they haven't happened to you yet.
|
| "Clicking on links to stuff you needed only to find them
| broken" is one such struggle; and so "not breaking your own
| URLs, such that, under the veil of ignorance, you might
| encounter fewer broken links in the world" is one such
| corollary to the Golden Rule.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| In this case ... it's all but certainly a losing battle.
|
| Keep in mind that when this was written, the Web had been in
| general release for about 7 years. The rant itself was a
| response to the emergent phenomenon that _URIs were not
| static and unchanging_. The Web as a whole was a small
| fraction of its present size --- the online population was
| (roughly) 100x smaller, and it looks as if the number of
| Internet domains has grown by about the same (1.3 million
| ~1997 vs. > 140 million in 2019Q3, growing by about 1.5
| million per year). The total number of websites in 2021
| depends on what and how you count, but is around 200 million
| active and 1.7 billion total.
|
| https://www.nic.funet.fi/index/FUNET/history/internet/en/kas.
| ..
|
| https://makeawebsitehub.com/how-many-domains-are-there/
|
| https://websitesetup.org/news/how-many-websites-are-there/
|
| And we've got thirty years of experience telling us that the
| _mean_ life of a URL is on the order of months, not decades.
|
| If your goal is stable and preserved URLs and references,
| you're gonna need another plan, 'coz this one? It ain't
| workin' sunshine.
|
| What's good, in this case, is to provide a mechanism for
| archival, preferably multiple, and a means of searching that
| archive to find specific content of interest.
| serverholic wrote:
| Collective behavior can work if it's incentivized.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Not where alternative incentives are stronger.
|
| Preservation for infinity is competing with current
| imperatives. The future virtually always loses that fight.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| There are over a thousand redirects in an Apache config file for
| a company I contracted with. The website was 20 when I worked
| there, it is now 26 years and AFAIK they still stick to this
| principle. And it's still a creaky old LAMP stack. It can be
| done, but only if this equation holds: URL
| indexing discipline > number of site URLs
|
| (There was no CMS, every page was hand-written PHP. And to be
| frank, maintenance was FAR simpler than the SPA frameworks I work
| with today.)
| tingletech wrote:
| that URL changed; it used to start `http:`-- now it starts
| `https:` -- not cool!
| detaro wrote:
| The HTTP url works fine still, it sends you to the right place.
| laristine wrote:
| Not exactly though, it only redirects you to the HTTPS
| version if it was set up that way. Otherwise, it will show a
| broken page.
| mro_name wrote:
| I can't follow - does it or doesn't it?
| [deleted]
| detaro wrote:
| but the entire point of the rule is that you should set up
| your sites so that old URLs continue to work.
| greyface- wrote:
| June 17, 2021, 309 points, 140 comments
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27537840
|
| July 17, 2020, 387 points, 156 comments
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23865484
|
| May 17, 2016, 297 points, 122 comments
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11712449
|
| June 25, 2012, 187 points, 84 comments
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4154927
|
| April 28, 2011, 115 points, 26 comments
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2492566
|
| April 28, 2008, 33 points, 9 comments
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=175199
|
| (and a few more that didn't take off)
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| I know it seems to be part of HN culture to make these lists,
| but not sure why. There's a "past" link with every story that
| provide a comprehensive search for anyone that is interested in
| whatever past discussions :-/
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Immediacy and curation have value.
|
| Note that dang will post these as well. He's got an automated
| tool to generate the lists, which ... would be nice to share
| if it's shareable.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.
| ..
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| grumbel wrote:
| So what happen to that URN discussion? It has been 20 years. Have
| there been any results I can actually use on the Web today? I am
| aware that BitTorrent, Freenet and IPFS use hash based URIs,
| though none of them are really part of the actual Web. There is
| also rfc6920, but I don't think I have ever seen that one in the
| wild.
|
| Hashes aside, allowing linking to a book by it's ISBN doesn't
| seem to exist either as far as I am aware, at least not without
| using Wikipedia's or books.google.com's services.
| paleogizmo wrote:
| IEEE Xplore at least uses DOIs for research papers. Don't know
| if anyone else does, though.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Everyone uses DOIs for research papers, and
| https://doi.org/<DOI> will take you there. In fact, I think
| the URI form is now the preferred way of printing DOIs.
| nathias wrote:
| IPFS gives you immutable links
| superkuh wrote:
| Until the IPFS devs decide that IPFS protocol v1 might become
| insecure in the medium term and create an new, secure, better,
| incompatible IPFS protocol v2 and every link, every search
| index, every community ever suddenly disappears. Don't laugh.
| It happened to Tor two months ago. The onion service bandwidth
| has been reduced by about 2/3 over November as distros and
| people upgraded to incompatible Tor v3 only software.
|
| https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-rend-relayed-cells.pn...
|
| The weakness is always the people.
| spijdar wrote:
| > The onion service bandwidth has been reduced by about 2/3
| over November
|
| Back to 2019 levels of bandwidth? I feel like I may be
| misreading that graph, but I'm more curious about what
| bandwidth suddenly spiked the last two years more so than the
| drop back down.
|
| At any rate, I always understood the main point of Tor was
| providing an overlay network for accessing the internet and
| maintaining secure anonymity as much as possible, with its
| own internal network being more of a happy side effect.
|
| I don't think IPFS would be as quick to kill compatibility
| with a vulnerable hashing algo compared to Tor since they're
| not aiming for security and anonymity as primary goals.
| mro_name wrote:
| cool!
| iggldiggl wrote:
| Except now you can't update the contents of a page not even
| one tiny bit without also changing its URL, which is equally
| useless.
|
| While I concede that the ability to retrieve the previous
| version of a page by visiting the old URL (provided anybody
| actually still _has_ that old content) might come in handy
| sometimes, I posit that in the majority of cases people will
| want to visit the _current_ version of a page by default.
| Even more so, I as the author of my homepage will want the
| internal page navigation to always point to the latest
| version of each page, too.
|
| So then you need an additional translation layer for
| transforming an "always give me the latest version of this
| resource"-style link into an "this particular version of this
| resource" IPFS link (I gather IPNS is supposed to fill that
| role?), which will then suffer from the same problem as URLs
| do today.
| mro_name wrote:
| a content-derived uri is a necessity for some things
| (indisputable facts, scientific papers, opinions at a
| moment in time, etc.) but foolish for others. Think of a
| website displaying the current time or anything inherently
| mutable.
|
| But having unchanged documents move to new locations on the
| same domain without a redirect but a 404 is just utter
| unforgivable failure. Or silently deleted documents, also
| an uncool nuisance.
|
| Both happen a lot. That's what comes to my mind, when I
| read the initial quote.
| hartator wrote:
| Except the name URL to URI!
| kixiQu wrote:
| > Do you really feel that the old URIs cannot be kept running? If
| so, you chose them very badly. Think of your new ones so that you
| will be able to keep then running after the next redesign.
|
| "Never do anything until you're willing to commit to it forever"
| is not a philosophy I'm willing to embrace for my own stuff,
| thanks. Bizarre how blithely people toss this out there. Follow
| the logic further: don't rent a domain name until you have enough
| money in a trust to pay for its renewals in perpetuity!
|
| > Think of the URI space as an abstract space, perfectly
| organized. Then, make a mapping onto whatever reality you
| actually use to implement it. Then, tell your server. You can
| even write bits of your server to make it just right.
|
| Oh, well if it's capable of implementing something _abstract_ ,
| I'm sure that means there will never be any problems. (See: the
| history of taxonomy and library science)
| judge2020 wrote:
| Going a little in the opposite direction is the best
| compromise: keep the information that was available via the old
| url accessible via the old url in perpetuity (or for the
| duration of the website). Even a redirect is better than
| destroying URLs that have been linked to elsewhere for years.
| diveanon wrote:
| I feel at this point reminiscing about a time when the web was
| actually designed to be usable isn't really productive.
|
| Some of the largest companies on the planet are actively opposed
| to this concept. If you care about this kind of thing champion it
| from within your own organization.
| codetrotter wrote:
| A lot of things can be said about the impact that the largest
| companies have on the web, but on the specific discussion about
| not breaking URIs, I think they are generally good at keeping,
| or redirecting, links to content for as long as the content is
| up.
| diveanon wrote:
| They just create walled gardens instead.
|
| Pinterest is a great example of how organizations put
| business interests ahead of building an accessible web.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-12-04 23:00 UTC)