Cool URIs Don't Change¶
Berners-Lee, T. (1998). Cool URIs Don't Change.
Cited by¶
4 citations across 4 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Identifier Assignment
- The web's hard-won practice of permanent versus temporary resolution, of preserving downstream references through redirects, and of avoiding resolution chains transfers to library-system migrations and to versioned-record management; the database practice of stable keys decoupled from mutable attributes transfers to customer-record design, where its absence produces the duplicate records that wreck deduplication and history.
This sourceStates the web discipline of permanent versus temporary identifiers, preserving downstream references through redirects and avoiding resolution chains — the practice ported to library migrations and versioned-record management.
- The web's hard-won practice of permanent versus temporary resolution, of preserving downstream references through redirects, and of avoiding resolution chains transfers to library-system migrations and to versioned-record management; the database practice of stable keys decoupled from mutable attributes transfers to customer-record design, where its absence produces the duplicate records that wreck deduplication and history.
- Persistent Identifier
- The stable token is the DOI string, opaque and assigned once — crucially not a URL, because a URL encodes the article's current location and therefore breaks the moment the publisher migrates servers, which is exactly the link-rot failure the prime diagnoses as "used as if persistent when no resolver was maintained behind it."
This sourceArgues that good identifiers are designed for simplicity, stability, and manageability — as names not locations — so that citation does not break when a server moves.
- The stable token is the DOI string, opaque and assigned once — crucially not a URL, because a URL encodes the article's current location and therefore breaks the moment the publisher migrates servers, which is exactly the link-rot failure the prime diagnoses as "used as if persistent when no resolver was maintained behind it."
- Retired Term
- And in web and identifier systems, redirects, tombstones, and record-merger markers keep old identifiers resolvable even after the canonical form has changed.
This sourceArgues that identifiers should remain resolvable after content changes, motivating redirects and persistence rather than deletion of old URLs.
- And in web and identifier systems, redirects, tombstones, and record-merger markers keep old identifiers resolvable even after the canonical form has changed.
Mechanisms¶
- Alias Redirect Table
- Its strength is that it is the antidote to link rot
This sourceExplains why stable URIs prevent dangling links when sites, files, names, and organizational structures change.
- Its strength is that it is the antidote to link rot
Verification¶
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Links previously used in the corpus¶
Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.
Registry ID ref:95e63a599c9a · see in the full table