In todays issue of Dagens Nyheter, the largest morning paper in Sweden, an article about pensions caught my eye, not so much because of the subject, but because of the URLs they referred to in the article. Here are the three URLs they referred to:

• http://www.collectum.se
• http://www.collectum.se/templates/Page____13901.aspx
• http://www.collectum.se/default_v2____13883.aspx

The first one is OK from a user interface perspective, but the second and the third one made me chuckle, especially as the second one actually had a note which freely translated went something like "Note that four underline characters are needed for the direct link to work".

Clearly, the people who designed this web site have not read neither Jakob Nielsen's "URL as UI" nor W3C's "Cool URIs don't change". I guess they never thought about being referred to from a newspaper in print where people actually have to type their URLs into their web browser.

Dagens Nyheter tries to make the situation better by providing a link to their online version of the article at dn.se/pensionskryss, which indeed makes it a bit easier for the readers to click the links. Sadly, the webmasters of Dagens Nyheter haven't done their homework either - the link is just a redirect to the article, which has this beautful URL: http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=547&a=692119. So, let's say that you saved a bookmark to the article, and want to refer a friend of yours by word of mouth a week later when you have forgotten that there was a human-friendly link available - now you must send the link via e-mail or other electronic media. Simply telling your friend over the phone is completely impossible, which it would not have been if the link were something like http://www.dn.se/ekonomi/2007/09/16/pension.

Oh well.. the world is far from perfect. Happily, at work, we're using a content management system that automatically creates URLs that look nice: Plone.