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.

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

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From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 15:16:06 +0100 (BST)

> the URN standard was that they would reduce the problem of stale

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.

>      RFC 2505 Anti-Spam Recommendations for SMTP MTAs.

They're not standards-track though.

L.

<[email-masked]>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>

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From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 15:16:06 +0100 (BST)

L.

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From: "Stephen Sprunk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 11:26:00 -0500

> 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.

S

      |          |         Stephen Sprunk, K5SSS, CCIE #3723
    :|:        :|:        NSA, Network Consulting Engineer
   :|||:      :|||:       14875 Landmark Blvd #400; Dallas, TX
.:|||||||:..:|||||||:.    Pager: 800-365-4578 / 800-901-6078
C I S C O S Y S T E M S   Email: [email-masked]

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From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 02:52:05 +1000

Date:        Mon, 16 Aug 1999 11:26:00 -0500
    From:        "Stephen Sprunk" <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>

  | The server _sent_ the status code; there's no need for the client to inform
  | the server of what the server already knows.

You missed the point entirely.   There are two (well, three) servers involved -
one which contained a link that refered to the second.   The second is where
the page used to be, it now has the 3xx/4xx referral to the third server
(that server is kind of irrelevant here).

The server that Lloyd wanted to inform was first server, where the outdated
link lives, rather than the second, which (as you say) clearly already
knows the URL has moved.

kre

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From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 17:55:32 +0100 (BST)

> 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.