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

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

On Mon, 16 Aug 1999, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

> Sez Lloyd Wood:
> > 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.
> 
> Read your access log; all URLs and reponse codes are recorded there,
> including 3xx and 4xx.
> 
> The server _sent_ the status code; there's no need for the client to inform
> the server of what the server already knows.

Read what I wrote; the _server of the referring page_ is not
necessarily the server of the referred-to page, unless you're some
corporate webmaster who refuses to acknowledge or link to anything
outside your corporation (and who regularly commissions complete site
redesigns to ensure that inbound deep links from elsewhere are
completely broken, come to think of it).

A 404 resulting from your deletion isn't your or your server's problem
since you removed the material; it only becomes a problem for the
people with documents linking to that material (and it takes them time
to discover and manually fix their links, even if they're running
their own spider/checker).

This link relationship is not adequately documented/resolved in
error-logs that naively assume a simple one-to-one
single-client/single-server relationship, and this is detrimental to
the granularity, interconnectedness and entropy of the web of a whole.

Imagine the utility of your browser automatically reporting 404s back
to the search engine that you obtained the link from, for instance.
You'd actually use something else other than Google's 'cached copy'
feature.

if I was a corporation, I'd join the W3C to do something about this -
but then, if I was a corporation, I wouldn't see the need to do
anything about this, and I'd judge something like developing streaming
multimedia technology for adverts as much more worthy of my corporate
time.

L.

and this discussion should go to somewhere more appropriate. Not that
I can think of anywhere.

> S
> 
>       |          |         Stephen Sprunk, K5SSS, CCIE #3723
>     :|:        :|:        NSA, Network Consulting Engineer
>    :|||:      :|||:       14875 Landmark Blvd #400; Dallas, TX
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> C I S C O S Y S T E M S   Email: ssprunk at cisco.com

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