Via Scripting News, Web Sites That Heal. "Users are frustrated with linkrot. Web sites are updated, links are changed, and pages are eliminated. People cannot find what they want because pages are missing, or seem to be missing. This is a serious problem. It has also reached a point where it is downright silly."
"Web sites need to heal each other... My proposal revolves around web services and the semantic web. Simply stated, web sites need to talk to each other as they are changed. If my web site changes, it should attempt to locate all other web sites that link to mine. At the primitive end of things, my site could at least send the webmasters of those sites the information without my help. A more sophisticated solution would be to have my web server talk to other web servers and ask them to (automatically) change their links."
An intriguing idea... I wonder if it could work. There's a lot involved... even if it becomes automated to some degree, a human has to keep track of what changed and where it moved to. 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.
Monday, March 11, 2002
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