Absolutely true, and also a problem. The fact of the matter is unskilled people are always going to be designing websites. This is OK! However, it does mean t

Absolutely true, and also a problem. The fact of the matter is unskilled people are always going to be designing websites. This is OK! However, it does mean that we should require them to do as little as possible so they have the best chance of getting it right. Asking them to design a second UI right from the start on top of the first HTML/JS one -- and then telling them never to change it(!) -- is a little much. Instead of URLs, websites should have UUIDs to identify each resource. They should also have metadata describing what that resource is. The metadata (eg "articles/urls-are-uis") should be able to change without breaking links to the resource. Browsers should be intelligent enough so that when you hover over a link you see the metadata, not the UUID. (This has one downside which if if you link to thing X and the UUID is later changed to point to thing Y, it may look like you linked to something you didn't mean to. This can be trivially fixed by including a "what the metadata was when I made the link" field in links along with the UUID) EDIT: I'm actually not set on UUIDs specifically, they're a little long. Any random, non-meaningful identifier is fine. Really I'm just saying that points 2 & 3 of the article are so good we should have made them the default (and perhaps only) option from the start.