Sometimes putting dates in URIs is good. These are nice and human friendly:

http://example.com/2005/annual-report
http://example.com/reports/2005/

When the W3C TAG released their findings on The Use of Metatdata in URIs, I make several comments to the public list about the use of Dates in URIs back in 2006.

The use of a date (eg year) to indicate when the URL was first created, and then subsequent paths added to the parent URI over time was a poor indicator for the human because they would infer that the date was the date of the resource.

So the above two URL are fine (the inference holds), but others do not, and do so badly:

http://example.com/2005/marketing/events.html

Are these events in 2005?

My point was that the date should be relevant to the resource (that the URI points to) not when the URL was created.

It gets worse. Just recently the W3C TAG released a new report:

http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2010/sum03.html

Wow? What do those dates mean?