4 ms·
> The clear goal of many firms is to dissolve the consideration of the URI or URL, with many of the previous protocols of the earlier Web forgotten. The questio
by dane-pgp 5y ago
> The clear goal of many firms is to dissolve the consideration of the URI or URL, with many of the previous protocols of the earlier Web forgotten. The question becomes less of “will this URL survive” and more of “will the idea of the URL survive?”
That's a great point, actually. Technologies disappear either because they are no longer used, or because they are used so often that they become part of the fabric of reality and thus ignored, like the wiring between a light switch and the bulb.
- jka 5y agoSometimes I think of URLs as being a building block of effective modern communication - long may they continue. Used carefully they can provide context, strengthen arguments, open windows of thought, and provide historical reference (clearly worth a shout-out to archive.org for helping with that last category, too). Stable, unchanging URLs (at least in terms of the content they address) are better than ones that may shift, and there's something about a hierarchy of origin in there too (in other words: if possible, link to the original source/paper/etc instead of an article -- unless the language used there isn't reasonably comprehensible for the intended audience).