../contacts/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ituneslibrary/Nelly Furtado/Loose/Say It Right...

Part of this path is an 'application identifier': ../contacts/../ituneslibrary/

Usually, 'application identifiers' are stable and change only when the
application changes (sometimes 'refactoring tools' can help).

'Unstable user data': email addresses, names, places, phone numbers,
social security numbers, sex, fingerprint, whatever. All this is
unstable:
/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Nelly Furtado/Loose/Say It Right...

Then there are 'stable data identifiers': unique identifiers
(counters, timestamps, UUIDs).

As a developer, I like to avoid writing extra code to 'refactor
unstable user data'. Specially if the unstable user data is used in
multiple places, as in:

/contacts/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
/contacts/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
...
/comments/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
...

The email address can change, so I need to write code to change it in
all places (including references). However if I use stable unique
identifiers, there is no problem. This is the reason to use 'article
id', 'person id', 'order id' and so on: Because developers are lazy.

Personally, I would rather use stable identifiers (for example
counters) than keep 'wrong' email addresses, or risk typos in blog
URLs. But this is just my view.

Thomas

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