| Good comment, thanks for sharing. It's an interesting topic. I agree with you that identifiers can be intended for humans or machines, and there's often different features to optimize for depending. URIs are the strange middle ground where they include pitfalls of having to account for both humans and machines. In an interesting way, each individual website has to come up with its own system for communication. It may be a simple slug (/my-new-blog/), or it may be an ID system (?post=3). It could be something else completely. There is some value in offering that creativity, but a system where URIs are derived from content also makes a lot of sense to me. You mentioned a hash which I think is the right idea. It seems reasonable enough that URIs could take inspiration from other technologies like git, or even (dare I say) blockchain. This leads naturally to built in support for archiving of older versions, as content is diffed between versions. There's some fun problems to think about like how to optimize the payload for faster connections, then generate reverse diffs for visiting previous versions. Or if browsers should assume you always want the newest version of the page, and automatically fetch that instead. This solves some problems, and creates many others. Interesting thought experiment anyway. |