A few years back I always used to say a good URL should be three things: - Persistent - Readable - Hackable And the greatest of these was persistent. Three is a nice number and I enjoy a biblical reference or two but I’m not sure I ever really thought hackable mattered. It’s a nice geek feature to navigate by chopping bits out of URLs but do punters actually do that? If they do it’s probably more because your navigation is broken than because your URLs make nice sentences.

But the persistent / readable trade off is hard. My natural inclination is to repeat the words of my former teacher; “the job of a URL is to identify and locate a resource, the job of a resource is to describe itself.”

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URLs have long since broken free of the href attribute and the URL bar. They’re on TV, read out on radio and on the side of buses. Pretending that URLs are just there to identify and locate sidesteps how they actually get used and how people think about them. When they stopped being an implementation detail of the linky web, when they stopped being identifiers and started becoming labels, everyone had an opinion on what they were for and what they should look like. The techy people have an opinion, the UX people have an opinion, the brand manager has an opinion, the marketing department have an opinion, the SEO people have an (often misguided) opinion and then the social media team chip in with theirs. And the people selling domains want to sell more domains. None of the opinions agree or are reconcilable. Like most things with more than one stakeholder the result is a bit of a shambles.