Web developer Trevor Morris has a short post on the attrition of web sites over the years.
I have run the Laravel Artisan command I built to get statistics on my outgoing links section. Exactly one year later it doesn't make good reading.
[...] The percentage of total broken links has increased from 32.8% last year to 35.7% this year. Links from over a decade ago have a fifty per cent chance of no longer working. Thankfully, only three out of over 550 have gone missing in the last few years of links, but only time will tell how long they'll stick around.
As pointed out in the early and mid 1990s, the inherent centralization of sites, later web sites, is the basis for this weakness. That is to say one single copy exists which resides under the control of the publisher / maintainer. When that one copy goes, it is gone.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Wednesday January 31 2024, @12:41AM
I don't do web stuff so I don't really know the issues, just the results. I've often wondered why websites don't periodically run a spider to check all the links on their page to ensure they're still valid.
I've also wondered why, when a large website decides to move page foo to bar, they don't make foo a link to bar. It's really annoying when not only your docs, but the first 3 pages of google results send me to foo/bigAssCompany.com when that page got moved to bar/bigAssCompany.com years ago and now foo gives a 404 error.
An example would be my local library. I used to login and end up on the home page. A couple years ago they revamped their web site (a good thing), now when I log in I end up on a 404 page. The menus and stuff are still there and it all works, but...... Yeah, I could fix the bookmark. But what html address should I set it to? And how many "average" users know that's even an option?
It's just a fact of life that people with brains the size of grapes have mouths the size of watermelons. -- Aunty Acid