HTTP: The Definitive Guide

The Future

URLs are a powerful tool. Their design allows them to name all existing objects and easily encompass new formats. They provide a uniform naming mechanism that can be shared between Internet protocols.

However, they are not perfect. URLs are really addresses, not true names. This means that a URL tells you where something is located, for the moment. It provides you with the name of a specific server on a specific port, where you can find the resource. The downfall of this scheme is that if the resource is moved, the URL is no longer valid. And at that point, it provides no way to locate the object.

What would be ideal is if you had the real name of an object, which you could use to look up that object regardless of its location. As with a person, given the name of the resource and a few other facts, you could track down that resource, regardless of where it moved.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working on a new standard, uniform resource names (URNs), for some time now, to address just this issue. URNs provide a stable name for an object, regardless of where that object moves (either inside a web server or across web servers).

Persistent uniform resource locators (PURLs) are an example of how URN functionality can be achieved using URLs. The concept is to introduce another level of indirection in looking up a resource, using an intermediary resource locator server that catalogues and tracks the actual URL of a resource. A client can request a persistent ...