The oldest instance of it that I know is putting something like download before or after the youtube domain. This must have been 2008±2. I very much doubt that's the first instance ever but I wasn't around online in the 90s (aside from on my grandma's machine who didn't know her computer had a web browser, but that wasn't very conscious, just a neutral net (young me) clicking buttons to see the effect)

ss before youtube.com brings you to a download page (i.e. ssyoutubecom)

Subject: Discontinuation of Service in the Great Britain

Blocked in the UK :(

or youtube5s

It works well with bookmarklets. This swizzles between arxiv.org <-> www.talk2arxiv.org. I've now added it to my Favorites bar, next to arxiv.org/abs <-> arxiv.org/pdf and twitter.org <-> nitter.net. Thanks for the service!

javascript:((u,a,b,c)=%3Ewindow.location.href=u.match(a)?u.replace(a,b):u.startsWith(b)?u.replace(b,c):u)(window.location.href,/https:\/\/arxiv\.org\/(abs|pdf)\//,'https://www.talk2arxiv.org/pdf/','https://arxiv.org/pdf/')

It bugs me cause it's kinda true but kinda misleading, I don't know if casual web users realize it's a whole different domain. Sometimes it's not important, sometimes it is.

Yeah doesn't help that some browsers hide the full url.

CERN circa 1994.

Tell me more?

And where does this mention a constant mutation of urls as a mnemonic system as a substitute for a form submission to provide a service in 1-1 correspondence to another service?

URLs can be manipulated. It’s even encouraged.

Really? I thought it was recommended for URLs to stay static, as to not break old links.

URLs can be manipulated by the user. If they’re human-readable we can explore a site without links.

Consider something like phpbb. There are thousands of instances in the world, all with similar URLs. You might have some management script or bookmarks that rely on this URL structure and you can just change the domain name to use them on a new site.

Ditto for discovering historical blog posts on a wordpress site. Or interacting with a Stack Overflow.

nyud.net (coral cdn) was my first experience with this pattern... back from the slashdot days in the 00s.

I use this on mitta.us/ to save pages. Got the idea from saved.io/, which does something similar.