I don't mean to pick on you at all, and I hope this doesn't come off that way... but this is a very interesting statement. You start off with a statement of id

I don't mean to pick on you at all, and I hope this doesn't come off that way... but this is a very interesting statement. You start off with a statement of ideals which you then directly contradict with a real, practical concern. I think that has to mean the ideal isn't a good one and in fact -- here's the interesting part, IMO -- one or more of the considerations on which the ideal was based are also invalid. Personally, I think the "lesson" here is that we should not aspire to have a one-to-one relationship between URI and resource. The attraction is that it's simple. But I think it's clearly too simple; that is, it is too inflexible to be useful: resources cannot be transferred between hosts or shared by multiple hosts; resources can only be organized in a single fixed way (for all time!) within a service (itself with a fixed organization within its host). It seems better not to try to impose these restrictions on resource identity and instead separate how a resource is identified from how it is retrieved. E.g. use a UUID to unambiguously identify a resource across all space and time, but retrieve the resource using a set of URLs which can change over time. I mean, the idea that a resource can move (its URL has changed) has been is built into HTTP for decades. Why attempt to create a service that assumes this does not happen?