Mark Harris wrote:
Richard Czeiger wrote:
Sorry Vlad - Ithink I'm with Lachlan on this one...
Docs can be edited or re-written but if they're obsolete, you don't
need to delete them - just don't link to them...
Actually, Lachlan said "no URI should be deleted" which everybody has
taken to mean "no document left behind" or some such. If a document
becomes obsolete, remove it and redirect the URI to a page that notifies
the user of the fact and offers a newer version. How many times have you
used Google and got a 404 because someone had removed the document you
were coming for?
And why would you have a document on your site that *wasn't* linked to?
Why would you cease linking to it from anywhere, even if it was only
linked from some archive pages?
Can you in turn suggest a reason why you would retain a document on a
site that was unlinked?
Because you don't know who else has linked to it from another site or
bookmarked it. Of course, if the page no-longer contains any relevant
information, it has been superseded by another document with a different
URI and is of *no historical value*, then the old one should be removed
with a proper redirect to the new one (probably 301 Moved Permanently).
But in such cases, you should generally try to reuse existing URIs
rather than setting up a new one.
There's a good example of this that I think I read in Cool URIs don't
Change, where a weather page had ceased to be updated because it had
moved to a new URI, but the old one remained without any indication of
the new one being present. In that case, they either should have
retained the old URI or redirected to the new one.
But URI != document, necessarily, and an superseded document may be more
dangerous than not finding anything.
I agree, but if documents are likely to be superseded by future
documents, then they should have some status section that indicates meta
data such as the publication date, the permalink of this version and a
URI to retrieve the latest version. e.g. Like the specs from the W3C
do. This does apply to commercial sites as well.
If you need evidence of why this is so important, how many times have
you followed a link to an old news article from a few years ago, only to
find that it has since been removed? This happened to me recently with
a news article on Yahoo news I think. I can't remember what article it
was or where I followed the link from, but it was rather annoying not
being able to read it.
--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
******************************************************
The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list & getting help
******************************************************
