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

From: Jacob Palme <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 11:28:30 +0200

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.

And IETF has published documents on social issues, for example:

     RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines.

     RFC 2505 Anti-Spam Recommendations for SMTP MTAs.

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Jacob Palme <[email-masked]> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 19:23:09 +0200

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 <[email-masked]> 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.
--------------------------------------------
[email-masked]
http://cuiwww.unige.ch/eao/www/Bertrand.html