Thursday April 28, 2005 A Self-Healing Web
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Well we already have self-healing in our operating systems. Why can't we do the same thing for web links? |
Recently while I was googling for something or other, I came across a hit to Bookmarks for Mazer. Like Wei-Hwa Huang, the person who made this web page available, I'm also very interested in all things puzzle and game related, so this web page was a delight to find. Trouble is that this page was last updated in July 1998, and as you can guess, a lot of those sites and links aren't around anymore.
So yesterday, I found a web link checker called Flinch and set it loose checking a local copy of Mazer's bookmarks. About two thirds of them were not found for one reason or another.
This was just one example, but this problem is endemic of the web in general. Links are just going to break. Isn't it about time we tried to automatically fix this?
This isn't an easy problem to solve. If it was, we would have it already. After thinking about it deeply for about five minutes tops, I can think of a nice little Firefox plugin that somebody might like to write though. Some thing that would check all the links on the current web page that you are viewing and highlight each link status (perhaps a background of green for good ones yellow for moved or redirected ones and red for the broken ones, similar to the way that Flinch does, on the reports that it generates).
A next step would be for something like the Mozilla Editor (or whatever the new standalone equivalent is) to allow you to do a similar thing for the web page you are currently editing. The owners of web pages should then have an easier job of fixing up their web pages.
( Apr 28 2005, 12:34:09 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]
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Maybe I'm just lazy, but I found that dead-links.com was perfectly adequate for my blog. There are a few sites - Amazon, LiveJournal, Yahoo! - that 404 any such spider probes, but they're easy to recognize. No need to hack up tools....
Posted by Geoff Arnold on April 28, 2005 at 02:15 PM PDT #