"URIs should be meaningful, not cluttered with meaningless information." Actually, URIs are opaque. The parts of an URI are implementation details - even the p

"URIs should be meaningful, not cluttered with meaningless information." Actually, URIs are opaque. The parts of an URI are implementation details - even the protocol, domain and port. To the user, changing database IDs, that happen to be part of the URI, is no different to changing the domain, port number or the protocol. Whenever I get into a discussion about "URI design", I state two rules: 1) Care about the URI design as much as you want. But never expect from someone else - especially the client - to make sense of that design. 2) When necessary, handle URI changes in a way that does not break the client (redirects are your friend). Btw. For this reason, browsers tend to remove the address bar from the UI (as much as possible).