URLs, maintenance, and history
January 3, 2022 10:38 AM Subscribe
"That’s when I first ran across the idea of the Persistent Uniform Resource Locator or PURL ....I guess PURL is the original URL shortener. But it was created not to abbreviate otherwise long and otherwise cumbersome URLs, but to make them more resilient and persistent over time." Ed Summers discusses the history of a piece of web infrastructure developed in the 1990s to mitigate broken URLs and still used by some organizations today, such as the Federal Depository Library Program.
That is fascinating. And the longbet that avoision posted is interesting - we're just a few weeks away!
posted by davidmsc at 3:21 PM on January 3, 2022
posted by davidmsc at 3:21 PM on January 3, 2022
PURL is OK, but I prefer the Knowledge Network Identification Term, or KNIT.
posted by leotrotsky at 4:21 PM on January 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by leotrotsky at 4:21 PM on January 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
Pages would be easier to preserve, if from the start, they were designed to last.
posted by otherchaz at 5:45 PM on January 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by otherchaz at 5:45 PM on January 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
Similar concept in scientific (medical?) publishing: the DOI. "The DOI system provides a technical and social infrastructure for the registration and use of persistent interoperable identifiers, called DOIs, for use on digital networks." e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0145561320981441
posted by nicolaitanes at 6:00 PM on January 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by nicolaitanes at 6:00 PM on January 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
Interesting that the longbets bet relies on the second condition (301) not the first, due to the automatic HTTP —> HTTPS redirect. Could have failed on that technicality if the server software had encouraged HTTPS-only by default.
posted by rh at 6:56 PM on January 3, 2022
posted by rh at 6:56 PM on January 3, 2022
Thanks for posting this! It's an interesting read, and I also enjoyed several other posts on the author's blog, which I hadn't seen before.
This reminds me a bit of Robust Links, which I've been meaning to implement something similar to on my blog. Currently, I archive all outgoing links at the time I first link to them, but I don't actually do anything with that archive at the moment…
It's interesting to me that with the PURL scheme, the onus is on the link owner to update it. I wonder if it would help to have some scanner that identified broken links that had PURLs pointing to them, and notified the maintainer of that PURL? (Or maybe that already exists, and it just isn't enough?)
posted by wesleyac at 12:31 AM on January 4, 2022
This reminds me a bit of Robust Links, which I've been meaning to implement something similar to on my blog. Currently, I archive all outgoing links at the time I first link to them, but I don't actually do anything with that archive at the moment…
It's interesting to me that with the PURL scheme, the onus is on the link owner to update it. I wonder if it would help to have some scanner that identified broken links that had PURLs pointing to them, and notified the maintainer of that PURL? (Or maybe that already exists, and it just isn't enough?)
posted by wesleyac at 12:31 AM on January 4, 2022
The backbone of linking to database content in college online classrooms.
Teaching instructors to understand the concept and use it consistently will likely help provide me with decades of job security, however, barring some unforeseen innovation in ways to connect the two.
posted by ryanshepard at 10:49 AM on January 4, 2022
Teaching instructors to understand the concept and use it consistently will likely help provide me with decades of job security, however, barring some unforeseen innovation in ways to connect the two.
posted by ryanshepard at 10:49 AM on January 4, 2022
I've had a PURL since the late 90s, and had to change its destination just twice since then. Still works, of course.
posted by scruss at 11:05 AM on January 4, 2022
posted by scruss at 11:05 AM on January 4, 2022
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Two random tidbits: the bet has a challenger some may recognize. And the bet is also coming due (February 22, 2022).
posted by avoision at 10:59 AM on January 3, 2022 [15 favorites]