Jeni's Musings

I don't think it's worth getting too worked up about this stuff; URIs are supposed to be opaque, after all.

However, I think the best guide for deciding how much versioning you need in URIs is the length of time you are happy to ensure that the URIs are not accidentally reused. If you are willing to record all URIs you ever mint "forever" then no explicit versioning is required. Remember, though, that this needs to cover the case of domain transfer, as John Cowan points out above. In the case of a .gov.uk domain, for example, this might not be a problem (even if a department disappears and then is recreated with the same name) but for many users, particularly those using personal domains, this is needs to be considered.

On the other hand, if you just want to "mint and forget" then putting a date in is a very good idea.

I like the way that tag: URIs contain a date and that it is a specific violation of protocol/etiquette/manners to mint a URI for a domain for a date when you don't/didn't own it. I think it's a pity there's no equivalent for HTTP: e.g., a fairly strong recommendation that if the top part of the path looks like year[/month[/day]] then it should actually be such for a period when the minter owned the domain.

Captcha: "within 1968". Is that versioned, then?