Best practices for stable URIs

1. It is important to keep the mission-critical URIs (or URLs, the webadresses) stable. Make a deliberate choice which pages and which classes of objects you want to manage. Do not aim to keep all your URI/URLs stable forever; this becomes unmanageable.

2. Linked Open Data / the semantic web uses URIs to identify the things itself and talk about this. The semantic web works with any kind of web addresses, including those that do not follow these best practices. The best practices are relevant only to make it reasonably likely to be able to keep your URIs stable.

3. In the face of changing technology, at some point you will have to use the webservers rewrite module to keep URIs stable. The simpler the URI pattern is, the easier this becomes. Thus the first recommendation is: Use rewriting from the start on. Define simple URI patterns (= no ports, no extensions like .php or .aspx, no parameters with ? or &) that are being rewritten to your current technology.