Linkguard To Cure Broken Links?

sean dreilinger writes: "Here's a BBC writeup of the company Linkguard, which hopes to monitor hyperlink stability via their 40-terabyte database and notify web authors when links are broken." This is a different effort than this one. Still, 40 terabytes?

Comments

This is already possible and for free

[prac_regex]

With a simple cronjob and Perl's wonderfulLWP module package, not to mention the other implemtations of tracking web-pages, any relativly smart administrator should already be doing this. It comes down to this, programmers are lazy and that is good, but is this just too lazy? phooey. Maybe this should be done as an apache module .. hrmm... maybe i should write that one.. mod_url_validator
<Location />
Add-handler Check-Links
</Location>
or something like that... no i dont like it. too much overhead. well at least my first offer works, because i use it.

Hah!

[BJH]

I like that bit about cataloging pages with a five-word "lexical" signature based on words that appear mainly only on that page. How are they going to deal with the 5,000,000,000 web pages that contain only the word "porn"? ;)

URIs don't change: people change them

[QBasic_Dude]

There are no reasons at all in theory for people to change URIs (or stop maintaining documents), but millions of reasons in practice.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote about this in a page titled Cool URIs don't Change. Many web authors don't realize file name extensions can be removed from the URI space. Pages Must Live Forever (Alertbox Nov. 1998) is another document about the same issue.

The Network Working Group is working on a replacement for URLs -- Uniform Resource Names. URNs are intended to serve as persistant, location-independent, resource identifiers and are designed to make it easy to map other namespaces (which share the properties of URNs) into URN-space.