It&#x27;s a shame that the author frames this &quot;issue&quot; in such a negative light.  Remember when this used to be the most valuable feature of the Web?<p>Remember &quot;The URL is the new command line?&quot;<p>That was back in the the early days of Web 2.0, back when people used that term with a straight face and even a bit of optimism, and where you might also use the term &quot;Mashup&quot; in the same sentence.  Having consistent URL formats for Posts, Users, Dishwasher Models and everything else made it so that you could pull information out of web pages quickly and easily without the need for a formal API.<p>It was a pretty cool time to be writing software because you could quickly suck in data from tons of places in ways that they hadn&#x27;t specifically anticipated.  But it died just as fast as it rose because of SEO.<p>Over the span of a single year, everybody had to change their urls to look like <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;site.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;learn-rails-in-20-minutes" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;site.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;learn-rails-in-20-minutes</a> and suddenly you couldn&#x27;t do anything useful with them again.<p>Shame.<p>But yeah, at least whatever edge case this author talks about isn&#x27;t there anymore.  To mitigate that, I&#x27;d recommend Jason&#x27;s Law of the Internet:  &quot;Try to avoid putting things on the Internet that you don&#x27;t want to be on the Internet.  That way there won&#x27;t be anything you put on the Internet that you didn&#x27;t want to be there.&quot;