In practice, cool URLs can become inaccessible even if they don't change

My point is - I expect all URLs to rot or change. But you're still cool for keeping your URLs stable while it's in your power.

Reddit permalinks disappearing is is the very reason for the phrase, not proof that it's wrong

Reddit uses the term 'permalink' which kinda does promise that.

I like how this article currently is right next to the other one discussing exactly that directly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36540957

These recent examples have probably also brought to prominence a point that I've always considered to be a given: if you think some data you come across online is important, save a copy --- it might be the last time you'll be able to access that URL. As the old saying goes, "data that is not backed up is data you don't want to keep". Storage costs, relatively speaking, nothing for textual data, and very little for images. Relying on browser bookmarks, or even worse, search engine queries, to find and expect others to continue to provide the content you truly want, seems to be turning out increasingly a bad idea.

The internet is so ephemeral and at the same time feels rather permanent.

Notably WARC format was developed only 10 years after that famous essay, and there are lot of other things that could have been done to make mirroring proper first class citizen in web.

No, they can’t. By definition, if they do that they are no longer cool.

Of course, Reddit and Twitter URLs were never especially cool in the first place. They’re particularly uncool now. Tragically unhip, you might even say.

It is complicated but doable. There is a list of allowed formats, like pdf-a, ms word, sql where there is consensus it will be readable forever. Not sure how archive.org does it, but i assume they will also transform a page to static and standard html.

I've long thought we needed a replacement that doesn't have that property. NNTP had a good storage model for important data:

If you want to read articles from a site, then you create a mirror.

I wish we'd move back to that.

In addition to supporting distributed archival (the only type of archival that works), it breaks targeted ads, and eliminates the incentives that lead to clickbait.

If Google had been an .supercool back in the day. What would the owner of .supercool charge them today?

I know that today Google would probably buy him out, but the transition period of going from nobody to Google they might needs to pay 100,000s of dollars for their domain.

Obviously you wind up with resolver resolver resolver services if this goes on for too long, but it is one of the few workarounds for the fact that time (and many other things) are not reified in the DNS system.

The idea is that http content can self sign itself, in a way where one can safely make a bundle of these exchanges & potentially sneakernet/thumb drive them to a friend who can then read the content. And trust that it came from the origin it came from.

Crossed with certificate transparency systems it really creates a new possible expectation on the web, that users can take-away the content they come across. This seems like a minimum bid towards FAIR. https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/

A URL cannot change; it is not a changeable object. For instance "https://example.com/index.html" is what it is: that string.

Just like the integer 42 cannot be changed to be 73.

All the problems with change have to do with how the URL resolves, like that it may point to different content at different times or become inaccessible. Changing and becoming inaccessible are not different problems: the former is impossible, the latter is the problem.

There are solution for permanent storage, that prevent URLs from going dark.

But even those offer ways to get rid of problematic content.

If it's important, put it on public IPFS and make sure people seed it.