The latest edition of MLA Style has been released, and predictably it goes further than past editions in providing guidance on how to deal with electronic resources. Somewhat surprisingly, they now recommend against including the URL to resources in a bibliography:

The MLA has ceased to recommend inclusion of URLs in citing Web-based works – unless the instructor requires it or a reader would likely be unable to locate the source otherwise. “Inclusion of URLs has proved to have limited value… for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or a session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors. Readers are now more likely to find resources on the Web by searching for titles and authors' names than by typing URLs,” states the handbook.

This practical recommendation does point to the sorry state of URLs in e-resources. In theory, content providers should be able to provide persistent URLs for their e-resources and have their URLs be easy to discover and use. This would allow content could to then be retrieved with a simple click, much easier and reliable then having to search by title and/or author name.

For whatever reason, content providers have failed to provide usable, reliable URLs for their resources. As a result, the MLA at least no longer considers the URL to be reliable bibliographic data for a resource. While we might mourn the passing of the ideal of a 'universal resource locator' for academic materials, the truth is that this will make many people's lives a lot easier, as they will no longer have to struggle to locate and cite URLs in their papers and articles.