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Keith Devens .com

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Daily link icon Monday, April 8, 2002

Communication by referer

Via diveintomark, Gary Burd: Communication by referer.

This is an innocent application of an idea I had after reading Web Sites That Heal. Here's what I said:

Probably the simplest idea would be to, when you get a 404 (or a 302), have your web server automatically "ping" the referring site so that a "hey, you have a broken link!" message will show up in the web server logs. If there was a standard format for this ping, we could automate handling of it to some degree.

Right now, if you send someone off to the void at the end of a broken link, they don't come back from the void to tell you about it. If your site automatically "pinged" them and said "You have a broken link to here (link) on this page (your page)" (I'm paraphrasing) you'd know about it.

Just like there's a (de facto) stardard for favicon.ico, there could be a stardard location like broken.lnk. If enough people did it, stats packages could give you reports, and the web might slowly start to become a slightly less broken place.

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Geek (http://www.geekblog.net) wrote:

I think it is a good idea, but I doubt it is likely to be implemented. That would take the W3C or some other standards body actually make a decision and the server and browser vendors would need to go with it. Too many big ego's too late in the game.

∴ Geek | 9-Apr-2002 2:53pm est | http://www.geekblog.net | #208

Keith (http://www.keithdevens.com/) wrote:

Well, if it was implemented by the browser makers instead of by a script on your web-server, or by Apache itself, there are fewer points of entry. IE by itself was able to initiate the favicon.ico idea which was subsequently implemented in Mozilla and Konqueror.

The only thing is that this idea doesn't give much benefit to the user, only to the webmaster, so it's much less likely to get implemented (as if it had any chance anyway Smiley

Keith | 9-Apr-2002 3:03pm est | http://www.keithdevens.com/ | #209

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