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Comment by mbleigh | Hacker News Reader

We already have permanent identifiers for the web...they're called URLs. This seems like a super-unnecessary level of indirection.

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This isn't for your URLs. It's for URLs you're linking to that you don't control and that are liable to change because other people (typically large content sites) don't understand how URLs should work.

So how exactly is this supposed to make things better? I want to save, let's say, www.newspaper.com/import-article.html. So I must create a PR, wait for it to be merged so that I get w3id.org/my-project/newspaper-article as a redirect to the URL mentioned earlier.

Now what? What if the newspaper.com URL changes? Am I supposed to keep all my URLs up-to-date (i.e. send pull requests every now and then to update my "bookmarks")?

web.archive.org seems much more useful, by copying the entire page at the time of creating a snapshot and thereby creating a true, durable copy.

The system linked to is terrible. Content addressable schemes should be solved via decentralized routing algorithms/networks. See ipfs et al mentioned else where in these threads. The poster's link is no better than link shortening

You can't own a URL -- they are not permanent.

Yes you can, that's the entire point of the domain name system.

Regardless, the point of this system isn't to alias your URLs, it's to alias others' URLs you want to link to. Sort-of like an archive.org that doesn't host content.

No you can't, unless you're a registry or can convince one to lease you a domain-name for an unlimited amount of time.

In practice you rent a domain name annually, and they get put back in the rental pool not long after the renter stops renewing their lease. Domain-names pointing to content are redistributed all the time when companies go bust or webmasters forget to renew.

If the webmaster forget to renew how exactly do you think a permanent link pointing to the dead website might help? It's up to webmasters to enforce consistent permalink in their website, no one else can do it better, end of story.

Web archive will be of great historical value for futur researchers, but backward compatibility of any service or software rely on developers, not a third party.

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