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In 1998, Tim Berners-Lee took to the W3 website to post a handy little guide called “Cool URIs Don’t Change.”“Pretty much the only good reason for a document to disappear from the Web,” he wrote, was that “the company which owned the domain name went out of business or can no longer afford to keep the server running.” Berners-Lee put the URL at the center of the web’s design. He was advocating for website owners to keep hyperlinks sacred as he had intended.

But the same year that guide was published, Jakob Nielsen was already tracking an increasing trend towards link rot. In 1998, the web less than a decade old, 6% of all links on the web were already completely dead. It turns out plenty of people were perfectly willing to be uncool.

Source: Cool URLs Mean Something – The History of the Web

https://conffab.com/elsewhere/cool-urls-mean-something-the-history-of-the-web/