Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)
- ID
- 12614
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 09 Aug 2026, 10:32 PM
- Fetched
- 11 Aug 2026, 8:18 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 5.5
- Created
- 11 Aug 2026, 9:24 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersdatabase_learnerssaas_founders
What happened
Tim Berners-Lee's 1998 W3C essay argues that URIs should never change and that broken links are almost always caused by poor forethought, not technical necessity. It debunks common excuses for URI changes—reorganizations, file moves, script-to-binary migrations—and recommends treating URI space as an abstract namespace mapped via server configuration rather than reflecting filesystem or implementation details.
Why it matters
If you're designing API paths, SaaS routing, or content URLs today, this essay is a concrete checklist: don't embed implementation details (cgi-bin, usernames, file paths, script names) in URIs; design them to survive tech stack changes. Founders shipping SaaS should decide URL structures now that won't break when they migrate from CGI to serverless or reorganize internally.
Discussion angle
Ask the room: which of your current project URLs embed implementation details (framework names, file paths, usernames) that would break on a rewrite—and what would it cost to fix them now vs. after launch?