4 ms·

People can know what good behaviour is, and not do good; that doesn't mean it isn't helpful to disseminate (widely-agreed-upon!) ideas about what is good. The p

by derefr 5y ago

People can know what good behaviour is, and not do good; that doesn't mean it isn't helpful to disseminate (widely-agreed-upon!) ideas about what is good. The point is to give the people who want to do good, the information they need in order to do good. It's all just the Golden Rule in the end; but the Golden Rule needs an accompaniment of knowledge about what struggles people tend to encounter in the world—what invisible problems you might be introducing for others, that you won't notice because they haven't happened to you yet. "Clicking on links to stuff you needed only to find them broken" is one such struggle; and so "not breaking your own URLs, such that, under the veil of ignorance, you might encounter fewer broken links in the world" is one such corollary to the Golden Rule.

dredmorbius 5y ago
In this case ... it's all but certainly a losing battle. Keep in mind that when this was written, the Web had been in general release for about 7 years. The rant itself was a response to the emergent phenomenon that URIs were not static and unchanging. The Web as a whole was a small fraction of its present size --- the online population was (roughly) 100x smaller, and it looks as if the number of Internet domains has grown by about the same (1.3 million ~1997 vs. > 140 million in 2019Q3, growing by about 1.5 million per year). The total number of websites in 2021 depends on what and how you count, but is around 200 million active and 1.7 billion total. https://www.nic.funet.fi/index/FUNET/history/internet/en/kasvu.html https://www.nic.funet.fi/index/FUNET/history/internet/en/kas... https://makeawebsitehub.com/how-many-domains-are-there/ https://makeawebsitehub.com/how-many-domains-are-there/ https://websitesetup.org/news/how-many-websites-are-there/ https://websitesetup.org/news/how-many-websites-are-there/ And we've got thirty years of experience telling us that the mean life of a URL is on the order of months, not decades. If your goal is stable and preserved URLs and references, you're gonna need another plan, 'coz this one? It ain't workin' sunshine. What's good, in this case, is to provide a mechanism for archival, preferably multiple, and a means of searching that archive to find specific content of interest.
- Andrex 5y ago
  Are losing battles still worth fighting? Personally I believe yes, because there are still those that benefit in the interim. Compare that to not bothering to fight at all in the first place.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    There's a good recent School of Life video on rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (Alain defends the practice). There's also performing maintenance to defer the inevitable. I'm generally in favour of that. But if you're getting exercised and emotional over something that simply and repeatedly proves not to work ... and there's some specific goal for that behaviour ... which can be more readily achieved by other means ... then I'd strongly suggest bailing on that fight. TBL got some things right about the Web. He had a specific purpose in mind. The Web has (IMO very much for the worse) moved beyond that. As I see it: - The goal behind the advice is to create a long-term useful addressable archive of online content. - The method advised ... has failed in this. Spectacularly. - Other methods exist. They are being used, and work reasonably well. - At some point you cut your losses. That said, I'm cutting mine in this thread. Cheers.
    - Andrex 5y ago
      Even though you cut your losses, I wanted to thank you for this comment. I sincerely appreciate the reading/watching material.
- tjoff 5y ago
  For the absolute vast majority of cases this is a quite a simple problem. Most don't care though. A rewrite of a site does not rewrite all the content. It is still there, the database might have been migrated but all the information is still there and the conversion process has everything it needs to do the final step of preserving one ID, or one string, that trivially can map an old URL to a new one that contains the same actual content. Sure, some intermediate pages might get lost but that is not something that is particularly valuable anyway and not something one usually links directly to. Don't let perfect get in the way of good enough.

by derefr 5y ago

dredmorbius 5y ago

In this case ... it's all but certainly a losing battle. Keep in mind that when this was written, the Web had been in general release for about 7 years. The rant itself was a response to the emergent phenomenon that URIs were not static and unchanging. The Web as a whole was a small fraction of its present size --- the online population was (roughly) 100x smaller, and it looks as if the number of Internet domains has grown by about the same (1.3 million ~1997 vs. > 140 million in 2019Q3, growing by about 1.5 million per year). The total number of websites in 2021 depends on what and how you count, but is around 200 million active and 1.7 billion total. https://www.nic.funet.fi/index/FUNET/history/internet/en/kasvu.html https://www.nic.funet.fi/index/FUNET/history/internet/en/kas... https://makeawebsitehub.com/how-many-domains-are-there/ https://makeawebsitehub.com/how-many-domains-are-there/ https://websitesetup.org/news/how-many-websites-are-there/ https://websitesetup.org/news/how-many-websites-are-there/ And we've got thirty years of experience telling us that the mean life of a URL is on the order of months, not decades. If your goal is stable and preserved URLs and references, you're gonna need another plan, 'coz this one? It ain't workin' sunshine. What's good, in this case, is to provide a mechanism for archival, preferably multiple, and a means of searching that archive to find specific content of interest.

Andrex 5y ago
Are losing battles still worth fighting? Personally I believe yes, because there are still those that benefit in the interim. Compare that to not bothering to fight at all in the first place.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  There's a good recent School of Life video on rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (Alain defends the practice). There's also performing maintenance to defer the inevitable. I'm generally in favour of that. But if you're getting exercised and emotional over something that simply and repeatedly proves not to work ... and there's some specific goal for that behaviour ... which can be more readily achieved by other means ... then I'd strongly suggest bailing on that fight. TBL got some things right about the Web. He had a specific purpose in mind. The Web has (IMO very much for the worse) moved beyond that. As I see it: - The goal behind the advice is to create a long-term useful addressable archive of online content. - The method advised ... has failed in this. Spectacularly. - Other methods exist. They are being used, and work reasonably well. - At some point you cut your losses. That said, I'm cutting mine in this thread. Cheers.
  - Andrex 5y ago
    Even though you cut your losses, I wanted to thank you for this comment. I sincerely appreciate the reading/watching material.
tjoff 5y ago
For the absolute vast majority of cases this is a quite a simple problem. Most don't care though. A rewrite of a site does not rewrite all the content. It is still there, the database might have been migrated but all the information is still there and the conversion process has everything it needs to do the final step of preserving one ID, or one string, that trivially can map an old URL to a new one that contains the same actual content. Sure, some intermediate pages might get lost but that is not something that is particularly valuable anyway and not something one usually links directly to. Don't let perfect get in the way of good enough.