Most date-in-path type things come from CMS systems (wordpress being the leader) that puts a date on every file / article it publishes.  I suspect that's what's going on here.

I hate to be "not helpful" after trying to be helpful, but I'm not sure who would be responsible for coming up with more permanent URLs for documents.  I agree it's a good idea though.

On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 8:15 PM, Shane Kerr <shane@time-travellers.org> wrote:
Wes,

At 2016-08-31 07:04:37 -0700
Wes Hardaker <hardaker@isi.edu> wrote:

> > Where is the repository for RSSAC documents?
>
> ICANN documents as a whole can be challenging to find, to the
> multiple-versions and archived nature combined with their web
> infrastructure, which is a typical CMS engine as far as I can tell.  The
> results are searches that don't always point to the most recent
> document.
>
> Instead, I'd suggest searching for "RSSAC publications" which turns up
> the much more useful and should always be up to date publication list
> based on release dates:
>
> https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/rssac-publications-2014-05-12-en
>
> [Note: I have no role over the ICANN pages and the publication process]

Thanks for the pointer!

My guess is that other people would try a similar process to the one
that I used and also end up in the wrong place.

Educating everyone in the world seems really hard. Fixing the ICANN
pages and publication process is probably easier, but I can easily
imagine it taking many months if not years.

What seems relatively easy would be to put some text at the top of the
document saying:

"Please look for the latest version of this document at this page:

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/rssac-publications-2014-05-12-en"

It's not great, because a human (or program) still has to search
through the list and find the most recent copy, but it at least gives a
hint about how to do this.

BTW, I love the URL which includes a random date in it, although I am a
bit disappointed that it doesn't have "pages/pages" in the path. ;)

Cheers,

--
Shane



--
Wes Hardaker
USC/ISI