>A lot of missteps in the early days of web technologies have made stable URLs impractical, unfortunately. Preserving URLs across technology migrations is alwa

>A lot of missteps in the early days of web technologies have made stable URLs impractical, unfortunately. Preserving URLs across technology migrations is always possible (assuming the old documents or at least a rough equivalent still exist in the new system), and usually not even hard, to achieve. Rewrites are not rocket science. Assuming short-sighted developers put .php on the end of all the links, migrating to a better system can use rewrite rules that trivially remove any .php ending from a URL, or that remap old folder layouts to new folder layouts. Even if you can't use mod-rewrite because of complexity that it can't handle, all you need is a server with a hash map (or equivalent) that responds with 301 redirects [1] from the old poorly designed link to the newer, cleaner link. The other problem you mention (no deep linking at all) is its own form of stupidity in design, but since the deep links don't even exist, that's a separate issue. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_301 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_301