If Burlington = 95, Toronto = ??

143; if you’re Environment Canada’s Weather Office, that is.

Completely against the concept that Cool URIs don’t change, the Weather Office appear to have arbitrarily changed the URLs for their 5 day forecasts. In the old days, if you knew the local airport code, you could find the weather report, for it was at (f’rinstance): http://www.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/forecast/city_e.html?yyz. (And yeah, I grew up with siblings obsessed with these guys, so I’ve known Toronto’s airport code of old.)

Now the same page is at http://www.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/city/pages/on-143_metric_e.html, and for Burlington, it’s …/on-95_metric_e.html. It doesn’t make sense, does it?

Canada has weather that can kill you. Somewhere, someone will have scripted a page that scrapes the Weather Office’s data, and so somewhere I’m sure there will be a weather report that’s not updating. I can see no good reason for this change; I’ll see if Environment Canada has one.

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This is what I wrote to them:

Why did the URLs of the five day forecast change? The old method was logical — if you knew the local airport code, you could go straight to the report. The new system doesn’t seem to allow this.

You shouldn’t ever need to change an URL. The World Wide Web Consortium has a particularly good article on why they shouldn’t change: “Cool URIs don’t change”, http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html

Somebody, somewhere won’t be getting their automated weather report because you changed the URLs. And in winter in Canada, that could mean life or death.

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