[Go Make Things] Cool URLs don't change (but they don't have to last forever)

By rahmat hidayat

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

​ 🎉 New Year Sale! Now through the New Year, get 40% off your first year of Lean Web Club membership. Level-up as a developer. Click here to learn more. Decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee wrote an article called Cool URIs don't change… Do you really feel that the old URIs cannot be kept running? If so, you chose them very badly. Think of your new ones so that you will be able to keep then running after the next redesign. If you grew up during a certain era of the web, the idea that URLs should persist forever is sometimes treated as gospel, sacred words handed down from the Godfather of the Web, Sir Tim himself. After building for the web professionally for over a decade now, I think Tim's article is great in spirit and hogwash in pragmatic terms. Let's dig in! It's all about wayfinding If you run a website or an app, I think the URLs for things should remain as persistent as possible. But designs change. Information architecture changes. The notion that you'll have the perfect structure immediately runs contrary to the experimental and ever growing nature of the web itself. If you move something on a website, you should permanently redirect to its new location. Update an article? Replace it with something new? Change the location of an account page? All of those can be handled with redirects. That may be a server-side thing that automatically sends users to the new location, or a message with an updated URL on the old one (for posterity sake). Changing things is normal. Just make sure users can find what they're looking for. A website shouldn't be a life-long commitment One of the challenges with Tim's statement is it implies that creating a website or app signs you up for a lifelong (or beyond) commitment. I've built a lot of websites over the the last decade or so. Some projects stopped making sense after a while. I took them down, but maintained redirects to other places. But over time, paying hundreds of dollars a year to keep domains you don't use is silly and impractical. Yes, link rot is frustrating. But just like in the physical world, things change over time. Places you enjoyed close shop. Erosion changes the landscape, creating new features, changing some, and removing others entirely. Why should the web be any different? Give yourself permission to let it go I know some developers who are dogmatically angry when links stop working. And I know other developers who get very stressed about choosing URLs, and the need to maintain projects long past when they're useful or interesting to the creator. Give yourself permission to let that stress go. Things change. It's ok. Cheers, Chris ​ Want to share this with others or read it later? View it in a browser.​ ​

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