The fact that you can't treat an URL as static doesn't make it "worthless", that's ridiculous.
If you want long term storage, you can always GET the content and store it locally. But if you only get a copy of the data, you can't do everything else (PUT back updated data, poll for changes, etc).
A loooong time ago there was a web site that hosted comments (...) The comment site got sold or acquired and someone put up malware on every single inlink. Blammo armed and dangerous.
And for all you know you can get malware from a data copy as well. Using URLs is not a reason to disregard basic security practices, like verifying the content that you receive from the other service.
The concept the OP is going for is 'deferred work' which is to say not to pass around data that isn't going to be used. And that is indeed a noble goal, but you must have a way to vet that the pointer you passed still points to the thing you thought it did
Which you have: the documentation says the URLs are valid for 4 hours.
If you want long term storage, you can always GET the content and store it locally. But if you only get a copy of the data, you can't do everything else (PUT back updated data, poll for changes, etc).
A loooong time ago there was a web site that hosted comments (...) The comment site got sold or acquired and someone put up malware on every single inlink. Blammo armed and dangerous.
And for all you know you can get malware from a data copy as well. Using URLs is not a reason to disregard basic security practices, like verifying the content that you receive from the other service.
The concept the OP is going for is 'deferred work' which is to say not to pass around data that isn't going to be used. And that is indeed a noble goal, but you must have a way to vet that the pointer you passed still points to the thing you thought it did
Which you have: the documentation says the URLs are valid for 4 hours.