WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: New WebAIM Site Released

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 12, 2006 2:10AM

On Mon, 12 Jun 2006, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:

> Congrats...great stuff.

Are we really looking at the same site?

> One small question, though: do you think it would be
> possible to add a few simple RewriteRule statements to the server (sending
> out the appropriate 301 "moved permanently" status code) to map old article
> URLs to their new location (assuming that the "slug", e.g.
> "evaluatingwithfirefox" remained the same, the rule would be fairly
> straightforward)?

Wait... do you mean that they broke all the links?

Checking... yes. 404. So the user gets an error message when he tries to
follow a link that used to work. This is probably the most common and most
serious single error in web site management. Tim Berners-Lee wrote about
it as early as in 1998:
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
The page disproves all the common explanations and excuses for breaking
old URLs.

Please tell me this whole change is a bad joke that will soon be revealed
and undone, or that I'm having a bad dream.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/