3 ms·
In an ideal world, a page that stopped existing for a reason would be replaced by some text about that reason, not a generic "there's nothing here".
by owl57 6y ago
In an ideal world, a page that stopped existing for a reason would be replaced by some text about that reason, not a generic "there's nothing here".
- _-___________-_ 6y agoThis would be best conveyed by a 410 Gone response with explanatory text about the reason in the response body.
- gravitas 6y agoThese ideas don't scale though - a 404 handles everything, not just textual content pages (meaning like images, css, js, etc. - the underlying plumbing for most sites). Nobody is going to sit there and write 404/410 content for moved assets one by one when they rebrand their site, that's madness. In my travels, most folks who actually care about this (SEO links) build an extensive alias/redirect map for the old/previous core URLs they want to remain functional as part of their rebrand, when the new site goes live the redirects are dropped in as well. This is especially true if they've ever published the URLs on physical media (mailed postcards, e.g.).
- cxr 6y ago> Nobody is going to sit there and write 404/410 content for moved assets one by one when they rebrand their site Maybe the monkey-do approach to web publishing that underlies those decisions is the problem.