I find it somewhat ironic that both the Web Standards Project and advocate Lachlan Hunt updated their sites recently but failed to meet one of the goals of the web: that Cool URIs Don’t Change. Even if they did find that the URIs had to change, there are ways to prevent the existing ones from disappearing—but that’s exactly what happened to their feed links.
On a related topic, both sites also failed to preserve their unique item IDs in the new feeds.
Both are subtle points that affect what’s most probably a tiny minority of users… but is it setting a good example that they don’t/can’t/won’t take these implicit standards into account?
I don’t claim to be perfect in this respect—I have no idea if my feed item IDs changed when I last upgraded WordPress, for example, although I bet they did—but I’ve got a plethora of 301 Moved Permanently redirects on this site, my old one and others I manage to keep old content available. And both WaSP and Hunt kept the bulk of their URIs constant/redirected, so they’re still better than 99% of the other sites out there; the only reason I’m picking on them is that I just noticed that both feeds were dead.
Which links disappeared on my site? I’m sure it was an accident, I’d never do such a thing on purpose, if you let me know which links died, I’ll happily restore them for you.
Just the syndication feed… sorry, wasn’t particularly clear about that in my post. (I don’t have the original URLs handy, as I’ve already updated my aggregator to use the new ones.) I also apologize for not letting you know directly; the email is still sitting, untouched and forgotten for over a month now, in my “drafts” folder.
For what it’s worth, the post wasn’t meant as a snark at you or WaSP, just to note that even you guys—who are innately and intimately familiar with the vagaries of HTML, XHTML, RSS, Atom, and seemingly pretty much everything that’s got an RFC number attached to it—can miss some of the “behavioural” standards like “Cool URIs Don’t Change”.