URLs, hyperlinks, and the core of the Web

Yesterday I watched Tom Dale speak on Stop Breaking the Web, from JSConf EU 2013:

Tom tells the history of the web, via the history of the telephone network. What’s the defining feature of a telephone? The thing that the earliest telephones in living memory and the latest smartphones have in common? The telephone number. Even though every piece of technology in the phone and the phone network has changed, the telephone number remains.

Heck, even Whatsapp uses phone numbers.

The URL remains the defining feature and core strength of the Web. We can move from HTML to JavaScript to WebGL to anything, and yet the Web remains the Web as long as it has URLs.

URLs give users a great deal of extra power. URLs mean we can bookmark a particular screen or resource. We can deep link and integrate apps together easily. And we can queue up work by opening new tabs, something that’s impossible in most desktop apps and unheard of in most mobile apps.

So, says Tom, stop breaking the web. Make sure URLs keep working. Make the URL the single source of truth for your app so that it gives the app everything necessary to display the desired viewport.