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- Hacker News
- by toomuchtodo
- by _kb
- This is something I work really hard to maintain on my websites. I often refer to government websites as sources for my guides, and these URLs break at an alarming pace. It's as if the German government is moving reference pages and services around just for giggles. It creates a significant maintenance burden on my end.
When I worked for an ecommerce website, we spent weeks making sure every URL worked after a migration.
Nowadays it feels a little quaint because most of my 404s are from LLMs hallucinating URLs that never existed, sometimes for topics I never covered. I wonder what nonsense it attributes to me.
by nicbou - URLs are URIs and URLs include "how to access this" which fundamentally makes it hard to prevent them from changing. If it were an abstract ID, like a UUID, or a hash or something I'd get it. So are all URLs bad URIs?by rendaw
- The "R" in URL is a misnomer. Designers of the early internet really wanted internet to be made of documents. It turned out the internet is actually made of interactive apps and services. Hence the impedance mismatch between terms and their practical meaning. URL was supposed to be used to locate resources in the resouce-oriented internet - instead, in the service-oriented internet, URL is a language of sorts for making remote procedure calls, some of which are read-only operations returning resources. So URLs are only as stable as the RPCs powering the service behind it. As services evolve, so do URLs.by Xirdus
- One of my pet peeves are pages that detect that I am from another region and then redirect: not to the corresponding page in my language: but to the site's front page with a different region/language setting. Sometimes it is another domain altogether.
This makes it difficult to share links to info on some products in forums, chat or a Wiki -- because the recipient may not be from the same country as I am.
See also: https://xkcd.com/869/ for a variation of the same problem.
by Findecanor - What's funny to me is that Scot Hanselman, an MS employee, wrote about it for a - not so- long time ago as well: - https://www.hanselman.com/blog/urls-are-ui - https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dont-ever-break-a-url-if-you-...
There are people in MS who knows this is an issue. But knowledge is not equal to behaviour.
by feldrim - A side effect of the idea that this information can be "permanent" means you should really think before putting it up there.
But today is not that, it is the opposite of that with stuff being put online that really doesn't need to be. This is permaweb vs slopweb.
by _carbyau_ - Great article, lots and lots of past discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=cool+urisby mooreds
- This post is related to (inspired by?):
"The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)" (longbets.org)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228458
186 points | 12 hours ago | 91 comments
by WalterGR - If you run a statically generated website, I recommend append-only generation, where you keep your `dist/` (or whatever web root) stateful between builds. This guarantees you don't break URIs even if the static generator changes or the source content is removed.
You can even make an orphan branch and check out that branch into `dist/` as a worktree to keep it under version control.
by glacials - Even for people who don't practice this, if you're publishing a static site, you can make sure you're generating output with rel=canonical links and at any given point, you should be able to run a tool (entirely separate from your chosen static site generator) over the output to extract those URLs and verify at time t2 that the set of links that existed at t1 (where t1 < t2) is a subset of those at t2.by cxr
- A classic. This keeps getting more credible as it ages. Now it's been at the same URI for 28 years.by zibw
- Sadly, though:
$ curl -I https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1998/nsf9814/nsf9814.htm HTTP/2 404 content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 content-length: 54737 date: Sun, 09 Aug 2026 17:58:44 GMT strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; includeSubdomains; preload server: Apacheby mikepurvis - It was removed in 2025 sometime between May 7th and September 11th:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.nsf....
Maybe its removal is related to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_government_...
by MarkSweep - What this page doesn't mention is 301 or 302 redirects. SEO has made "old URLs staying live" more of a widespread concern than it was at the time. And WordPress etc ship with inbuilt redirects upon slug rename
So to a large extent this has been mitigated and not using the suggestion here, which is to create a permanent URL ontology upfront
That said eventually neglect, removal, reorgs (or simply websites going offline) still happens... but the way the suggested goal has been advanced is due to becoming a business priority and with redirects and CMSes as tech to help
That said one suggestion made here turned out to be very useful and indeed is the default in WP:
If you use date as part of the taxonomy then -- as Tim BL says here:http://www.w3.org/1998/12/01/chairs> A reason for using a topic area as part of the URI is that responsibility for sub-parts of a URI space is typically delegated, and then you need a name for the organizational body - the subdivision or group or whatever - which has responsibility for that sub-space. This is binding your URIs to the organizational structure. It is typically safe only when protected by a date further up the URI (to the left of it): 1998/pics can be taken to mean for your server "what we meant in 1998 by pics", rather than "what in 1998 we did with what we now refer to as pics."
by firasd - Sounds like most URIs have been downright uncool, then!by EGreg
- Yes but how often in practice does the same information stay accessible via 30x redirects after one reorganization, let alone two or three?by bensyverson
- Not that long ago I clicked on a link that Microsoft provided somewhere in Windows -- could have been the event log, I don't remember. I do remember it was for a specific support article, but it ended up at a generic landing page for something. I am not talking about a link from Windows 95, it must have been Windows 10. But regardless, it is all gone. Then again, it probably wasn't a cool URL to begin with.
It's amazingly many news sites that also seem to scrub their URLs every time they do a redesign. Also uncool.
by torh - Entropyby sghiassy
- There is no financial incentive for most companies to maintain extremely old URLs. There is no large visible cost known to the project manager at a company who chooses to migrate to a different CMS.
A common solution is to create placeholders at the old URLs with permanent redirects to the new URLs, but that doesn't fix all of the old hyperlinks, so it becomes extremely expensive to maintain backwards compatibility after 2 or more CMS changes.
by thephyber - Mailing list archive software is a constant rug pull: today you link to a post about something relevant, and next month the link goes to a different message about a different subject.by Panino
- I bought an air conditioner last year, some wal-mart “smart” AC that was affordable (we had to get three for the new house we moved in to so budget was a big concern) and it has a QR code for the companion app. I finally got around to getting the app this summer and lo and behold, it’s a dead link. Yay.by phatskat
- Microsoft has a terrible habit of doing that. KB's used to have a predicable URL, they may again, but they keep changing them. Or any of their docs really. It's terrible as those URL's end up in other documents to be killed. This is not really an enterprise friendly way of supporting customers.
- Very uncool; Microsoft even uses an URL shortener for most of their links (from windows etc) so that they can theoretically change where the user ends up at if the original page is replaced for whatever reason.
But they shouldn't. Microsoft especially should make all of their documentation pages plain static HTML pages and keep them available forever.
But also, any Windows documentation can live offline in the OS itself. At least nowadays, I get how in the windows 98 / XP era they wanted to reduce disk usage.
by Cthulhu_ - Average time of url is 5 years.
Therefore I try to make a local copy of a document that I link to.
There a plugin for Firefox that can check bookmarked links. You will be surprised how they vanish pretty fast…
by sixtyj - Got an MX4 yesterday and it has a printed card with "Go to logitech.com/mx to get started" resulting in a "Forbidden" error page. This product hasn't even been out for a year!