| The author took an easy way out by recommending a canonical identifier based URL and a named URL, and then choosing a library as an example. Books in a library are seldom renamed, if ever. The named URL would be almost as permanent as the canonical URL. However in their earlier example of a bank account, a personal account name is typically the account holder name and the type of account, and both of these could be subject to change as a result of marriage, death, or the change in products offered by a bank. Even then, the rate of change is low. A better example that the author could have (should have?) used is that of a news website where the article title may change frequently and yet there is a desire to make the link indicate the type of content at the destination... this is the real crux of the issue. On a news site a canonical identifier driven URL may be correct... but does not sell or communicate the story behind the link and the link is likely to be shared without context. Sure you may see `example.com/news/a49a9762-3790-4b4f-adbf-4577a35b1df7` but this could be any news... it is far less obvious what is behind the link than the banking example as diversity in news stories is huge. Yet the named URL would likely fail too, as once created and shared it should not mutate or at least should remain working... and yet the story title is likely to be sub-edited multiple times as news evolves. The best scheme was not even mentioned in the article... combining both an identifier with a vanity named part: `example.org/news/a49a9762-3790-4b4f-adbf-4577a35b1df7_choosing_between_names_identifiers_URLs` . The named part can vary as it is not actually used for lookup, only the prefix identifier is used for lookup. Though that has it's own downside... one can conjure up misleading named sections for valid identifiers to misdirect and mislead. |