Cool URIs don't change (1998)
<i>>When you change a URI on your server, you can never completely tell who will have links to the old URI. [...] When someone follows a link and it breaks, they generally lose confidence in the owner of the server.</i><p>With 2+ decades to look back on after this was written, it turns out the author was wrong about this.  Web surfers often get 404 errors or invalid deep links get automatically redirected to the main landing page -- <i>and people do not lose confidence in the site owner</i>.  Broken links to old NYTimes articles or Microsoft blog posts don't shake the public's confidence in those well-known companies.  Link rot caused by companies reorganizing their web content is just accepted as a fact of life.<p>This was the 2013 deep link I had to USA Treasury rates:  <a href="http://www.treasurydirect.gov/RI/OFNtebnd" rel="nofollow">http://www.treasurydirect.gov/RI/OFNtebnd</a><p>... and the link is broken now in 2021.  I don't think that broken link shakes the public's confidence in the US government.  Instead, people just use Google/Bing to find it.