GoKawiilCool URIs don't change
What makes a cool URI?
A cool URI is one which does not change.
What sorts of URI change?
URIs don't change: people change them.
There are no reasons at all in theory for people to change URIs (or stop maintaining documents), but millions of reasons in practice.
In theory, the domain name space owner owns the domain name space and therefore all URIs in it. Except insolvency, nothing prevents the domain name owner from keeping the name. And in theory the URI space under your domain name is totally under your control, so you can make it as stable as you like. Pretty much the only good reason for a document to disappear from the Web is that the company which owned the domain name went out of business or can no longer afford to keep the server running. Then why are there so many dangling links in the world? Part of it is just lack of forethought. Here are some reasons you hear out there:
We just reorganized our website to make it better.
Do you really feel that the old URIs cannot be kept running? If so, you chose them very badly. Think of your new ones so that you will be able to keep then running after the next redesign.
We have so much material that we can't keep track of what is out of date and what is confidential and what is valid and so we thought we'd better just turn the whole lot off.
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