Why content systems should store real titles instead of deriving them from URL slugs

The article argues from an engineering standpoint that content systems should persist the original title rather than reverse-engineer it from the URL slug. Slugs are typically lossy, since non-ASCII characters are stripped, text is lowercased, and spaces are replaced, so the original title cannot be recovered. Slug generation rules also vary across systems and may change over time, which would break downstream dependencies that rely on reverse derivation. Internationalization adds further inconsistency, as slugs may be transliterated or kept as Unicode, whereas a stored title provides a single trustworthy source. The author concludes that storing titles explicitly trades some data redundancy for greater reliability and flexibility, supporting SEO, A/B testing, and multilingual needs.