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Comment by grumbel | Hacker News Reader

So what happen to that URN discussion? It has been 20 years. Have there been any results I can actually use on the Web today? I am aware that BitTorrent, Freenet and IPFS use hash based URIs, though none of them are really part of the actual Web. There is also rfc6920, but I don't think I have ever seen that one in the wild.

Hashes aside, allowing linking to a book by it's ISBN doesn't seem to exist either as far as I am aware, at least not without using Wikipedia's or books.google.com's services.

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Twenty years on, and I can still link to any item at Amazon as long as I have it's ASIN, and using the template:

    https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/<asin id>

Say what you will about Amazon (and Jeff Bezos), but I don't think they've broken a URL to any product of theirs ever.

Not broken perhaps, but I regularly click a link to a product and get a page about a totally different product.

My understanding is that product pages aren’t immutable, so sellers sometimes change their content instead of making a new page to keep the SEO the original page accumulated.

Having public edit history + permalinks to specific immutable revisions of product pages would be nice, but I could see how they’re not incentivized to add it because they don’t want ppl demanding an older price / feature that got edited out later on.

IEEE Xplore at least uses DOIs for research papers. Don't know if anyone else does, though.

Everyone uses DOIs for research papers, and https://doi.org/<DOI> will take you there. In fact, I think the URI form is now the preferred way of printing DOIs.

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