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

[Bertrand.Ibrahim at cui.unige.ch]

Lloyd Wood said:
> The main problem with stale links is that browsers do not fire off a
> notification to the server of the referring page, ...

to which Stephen Sprunk <ssprunk at cisco.com> replied:
> Read your access log; all URLs and reponse codes are recorded there,
> including 3xx and 4xx.

My server logs can only tell me which documents authored by other people
contain bad links to resources supposedly on my server (assuming that 
the "referer" info is logged as well). If there is no contact info about
the authors of those external documents containing wrong or obsolete URLs 
to resources of mine, I have no way to notify them of the problem and help
them correct their URLs. The best I can do is then find the email address of
the webmasters of their sites and ask them to forward any useful information 
I can provide to the author(s) of the documents containing bad links.

My understanding of Lloyd's remark is that it would be useful if the server
containing a document with broken links could receive notification of the 
broken link. Currently, only the server referred to by a broken link records
the error. In other words, the destination of the error will log the error, 
but nothing is logged at the source of the error.

Peace,

Bertrand Ibrahim.
--------------------------------------------
Bertrand.Ibrahim at cui.unige.ch
http://cuiwww.unige.ch/eao/www/Bertrand.html