Jeni's Musings

A minor point, but it is actually possible to create slightly more handsome URLs for statutelaw.gov.uk - see:

http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/help/UsingFriendlyURLs.htm

Your wine-making example looks like this:

http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/documents/2007/4/uksi/no4

You can even make direct links to parts of the legislation - for instance, that all-important wine and made-wine section:

http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/documents/2007/4/uksi/no4/3

In some ways, this is like your proposal, except that you can only search by year, or year and series, or year, series and type. It does nothing to help capturing navigation and search state, though. And i have no idea what made-wine is.

Infuriatingly, there doesn’t seem to be a way to extract such a link from a page you’ve reached by any normal means - no ‘permalink’ link. There are at least two good places it could be! And don’t even ask about permalinks to parts - or even a universal way of finding out what their identifiers are.

— tom