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Comment by dtf | Hacker News Reader

Another site that comes to mind is the Financial Times, which uses UUIDs for article urls, with no other indication of content.

https://www.ft.com/

https://www.ft.com/content/13be9132-8149-11e9-b592-5fe435b57...

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Oh wow, you really have to hope these are not the canonical links. If so, they are doing themselves an incredible disservice and the fact that no one has brought it to management's attention speaks gravely to the workplace culture there.

Not only does the full URL not show in my browser (Safari), the full URL doesn't even show on this forum (for me it is cut off after "content"). When you receive a URL via chat or on social networks, it is in the form of a preview and might not even show the domain name. The user also isn't typing these URLs in, with or without human readable text in the path. Essentially all of the arguments for making URLs more brittle (which is what you are doing by adding human readable text) are obsolete in a world where URLs have been relegated back to what they were always supposed to be: permanent identifiers to a semantically stable unit of content.

> Essentially all of the arguments for making URLs more brittle (which is what you are doing by adding human readable text)

Not if done right, like e.g. stack overflow, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/517355/string-formatting...

The human readable text is actually meaningless, and anything after the id will redirect there, e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/517355/this-could-be-any...

This technique (which I almost commented on in my original comment, but didn't) is brittle in a different way (making it so that attempts to search for the URL have no well-known canonical representation), and quite simply totally undermines the entire argument being made (which is why I didn't comment on it) that someone can use the slug of a URL to decide whether or not they want to click on the content: you can change the URL to say anything you want. At this point, there is no value in bothering with having done this: it is just extra text in the URL for no concrete benefit.

meta.stackexchange.com/questions/148454/why-does-stack-overflow-use-title-slugs/

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