Re: Broken links, are we ever going to address them?

Mark J Cox (M.J.Cox@bradford.ac.uk)
Mon, 23 Jan 1995 16:32:04 +0100

> > Idea 2: rather than the client implementing this, the server can do so
> > instead; when finding a failed URL it can initiated the BROKEN method
> This is my favourite too. Additionally a REDIRECTED method would be useful
> (this could even go so far as to perform an automatic correction :). Having a

I've been testing this automatic correction idea for a while. My server
does a fuzzy match of all the URLs on the site and returns a list of
close matches on a failed URL. Such as:

http://www.eia.brad.ac.uk/rti/guid/indox.htlm (=/rti/guide/index.html)
http://www.eia.brad.ac.uk/rtl/ (=/btl/ or /rti/)

Of course this only traps spelling mistakes and it requires an updated
table of contents of html documents.

Mark
Mark J Cox ---------------------- URL:http://www.eia.brad.ac.uk/mark.html
University of Bradford, UK --------------- tel +44.1274.384070/fax 391333