In an interesting experiment, Marcus Baker is trying something that might just make a lot of people out there anxious (especially if it works) - he wants to see if URLs are dying.

The idea is that the search engines are now so good, there is no need for a hard link to another site I have no control over. I'm a programmer and so I want loose coupling from my blog. Link rot is a good example of a dangling pointer to me and so I am refactoring back to English descriptions. Back to a query rather than a reference if you like. The plan is given a sufficient keyphrases you will almost certainly find the same reading material I based the blog entry on. Not exactly the same maybe, but blogging is about news and ideas rather than specific documents so I have room for flexibility.

He lists some issues that users might discover (and find annoying), such as: no interesting underlined text (links), reducing the signal to noise for impaired users, and knowing enough about a topic without having to have the links to other details. It's quite an interesting concept, especially in this world of links to links to links to links (well, you get the idea...)