A couple of weeks ago, I went to a w3c workshop about annotations on the web. It was an interesting day, hearing from academics, implementers, archivists and publishers about the ways they want to annotate things on the web, in the world, and in libraries. The more I listened, the more I realised that this was what the web is about. Each page that links to another one is an annotation on it.
Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the URL was a brilliant generalisation that means we can refer to anything, anywhere. But it has had a few problems over time. The original “Cool URLs don’t change” has given way to Tim’s “eventually every URL ends up as a porn site”.