Journal: News & Comment

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A new member of the lame list

One of the cardinal rules of Web design is that you should avoid breaking links at all costs, because you never know when someone might have bookmarked or linked to an obscure page on your site. People might come looking for ancient content, and they expect to find something.

It turns out that the Vancouver Sun, which published a piece of mine last week, has already broken the link to it, which used to be at:

https://www.vancouversun.com/newsite/networks/5032997.html

Click that link today and you get "Not Found: The requested object does not exist on this server."

Dumb. Dumb. They could so easily have fixed the problem by:

1. Creating an intelligent error page that bumps you back to the Sun home page, the tech section home page, or at least somewhere that lets you search the site or report the error, or...
2. Using the same URL for each week's "My Bookmarks" article, so that the current author's version replaced mine and people found something similar to what they sought, or even better...
3. Just leaving the article and URL as they were. HTML files are tiny, and Web server space is cheap, after all.

Now I'll have to reconstruct a version of the article on this Web site, which is fine, but the Sun forever loses any people who found it interesting and might have ventured into the rest of the newspaper's site had it been there.

The Web is ephemeral enough as it is. You'd think newspapers would understand the importance of archives, but I guess not.

[UPDATE January 8, 2003: In November 2002, I finally posted a copy of the article in question as a scanned graphic, if anyone still wants to read it.]

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