Re: Links going stale (was: Proper use of domain names).

[Lloyd Wood <L.Wood at surrey.ac.uk>]

On Mon, 16 Aug 1999, Jacob Palme wrote:

> At 16.39 +0100 99-08-08, Lloyd Wood wrote:
> >This is a social, rather than a technology, issue. Take it to the HTML
> >Writers Guild or similar; maybe they can get another grassroots
> >banner awareness ad campaign ('Don't break the web!') going or
> >something.
> 
> Maybe not only a social issue. One of the main reasons for developing
> the URN standard was that they would reduce the problem of stale
> links.

The main problem with stale links is that browsers do not fire off a
notification to the server of the referring page, saying 'I tried this
link from this page, and I got a 3/4 code, so in making the hyperlink
a bidirectional thing, I thought I'd tell you'. If e.g. Apache
cached/recorded this received information in error logs, repairing
links would be a much more timely process.

> And IETF has published documents on social issues, for example:
> 
>      RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines.
> 
>      RFC 2505 Anti-Spam Recommendations for SMTP MTAs.

They're not standards-track though.

L.

<L.Wood at surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>