One thing that I find constantly annoying is the inability of major newspaper websites to have human-friendly URIs. The URI (unified resource identifier) is the “web address” you see in your browser’s navigation bar. It can be very simple and easy to remember, post, share and type, like “nytimes.com”, or it can be so inexplicably long and ugly like this one, linking to an article about Google’s problems in China at the German daily “FAZ”:
http://www.faz.net/s/RubDDBDABB9457A437BAA85A49C26FB23A0/Doc~E9F73DC4F0C444FE4BA1181212F925369~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html
Three things are wrong with an URI like that. 1) it is too long for no good reason 2) it makes no sense to a human and 3) it is systematically unsustainable. Let’s continue this little survey through the German newspaper landscape. The other major newspaper is the “Sueddeutsche Zeitung”.