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. //]

Why should I care?

When you change a URI on your server, you can never completely tell who will have links to the old URI. They might have made links from regular web pages. They might have bookmarked your page. They might have scrawled the URI in the margin of a letter to a friend.

When someone follows a link and it breaks, they generally lose confidence in the owner of the server. They also are frustrated - emotionally and practically from accomplishing their goal.

Enough people complain all the time about dangling links that I hope the damage is obvious. I hope it also obvious that the reputation damage is to the maintainer of the server whose document vanished.

So what should I do? Designing URIs

It is the the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years. This needs thought, and organization, and commitment.

URIs change when there is some information in them which changes. It is critical how you design them. (What, design a URI? I have to design URIs? Yes, you have to think about it.). Designing mostly means leaving information out.

The creation date of the document - the date the URI is issued - is one thing which will not change. It is very useful for separating requests which use a new system from those which use an old system. That is one thing with which it is good to start a URI. If a document is in any way dated, even though it will be of interest for generations, then the date is a good starter.

In the mid-’90s, the web was exploding, but finding anything of actual value on it felt like an elaborate negotiation with whatever proto-search engine happened to be standing closest to the door. Unlike now, when Google is widely seen as both portal and gatekeeper, sites like AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, HotBot, and Ask Jeeves promised to tame the chaos, each with its own suite of quirks, charms, and flaws.

The real story of pre-Google search is not that early engines were inferior. It’s that they reflected a different Internet entirely, one where directories mattered, crawling was still an art, ranking was fragile, and the idea of “search” had not yet hardened into a single dominant interface. //

“Most people have completely forgotten how chaotic it really was,” Friend said. “Back then, if you typed a question into AltaVista, the odds were stacked against you if you were looking for anything specific. You’d receive 40,000 results that would leave you just as confused as shouting into a crowded room.”

Compared with Google’s once-user-friendly UI and more relevant results, combing through an AltaVista results page required patience and genuine skill that was honed over time. But AltaVista did accomplish one important thing: It set the expectation that search should be immediate. That expectation proved decisive. Once users experienced a search engine that could quickly sweep a huge index, they stopped accepting sluggish, partial systems as sufficient. AltaVista didn’t win the search war, but it clarified the rules of engagement.

“The conquest of space is worth the risk of life,” said Gus Grissom.

FreezePage is a free service for taking online snapshots of web pages.

With FreezePage you can freeze web pages so they can be recalled in their exact form at a later time or date.

Web pages change all the time, but with FreezePage you can be sure they stay the same.

How long are frozen pages stored?

From the moment you enter our site, you have your own personal account. When you freeze pages, they are automatically saved to your account as "My Frozen Pages".

To save space on our system, we require that you use your account regularly, i.e. that you log in or visit any page on our site. If you don't, we will delete your account and frozen pages in it.

• If you are an unregistered user, you must visit our site every 3 days.
• If you are a member (sign up for free), we only require you to log in once a month (every 31 days).
• Premium Users are, of course, not subject to this requirement.

It took two years and cost $5 million—but the results are absolutely spectacular. //

HOUSTON—Following the completion of a multi-year, multi-million-dollar restoration, NASA’s historic Apollo Mission Operations Control Room 2 (“MOCR 2”) is set to reopen to the public next week. The $5 million in funding for the restoration was partially provided by Space Center Houston, but the majority of the money was donated by the city of Webster, the Houston suburb where the Johnson Space Center is located. Another half-million in funding came from the general public via a Kickstarter campaign (disclosure: your humble author was a backer).

For the past two years, historians and engineers from the Kansas Cosmosphere’s Spaceworks team have been lovingly restoring and detailing the 1,200-pound (544kg) historic sage green Ford-Philco consoles that populated the control room—repairing damage from decades of casual neglect and also adding in the correct control panels so that each console now correctly mirrors how it would have been configured for an Apollo flight.

Ars was invited to view the restored MOCR 2 last week as the final finishing restoration touches were still being applied. We conducted some interviews and shot some photos while technicians and construction workers bustled around us, hammering and screwing the last bits and bobs into place.