Who to contact if a URL is broken?
Peter J. Scott
a problem with a URL? For instance, in NCSA Mosaic the Ultrix man
pages aren't accessible to me, and the Hytelnet/Library Catalogs/US
Community Colleges [http://info.cern.ch:8002/us0/us000com] contains a
typo disabling one link. I try to look around and find clues, but they're
rather slim; the best I could come up with was the mosaic-x@ncsa address
and the Hytelnet author, neither of which sounds exactly right. And I
rather doubt that postmaster@<URL site> would be appreciated.
Suspecting there *is* no better solution, I would at least like to
encourage URL authors to put their e-mail addresses in or near their
creations...
--
This is news. This is your | Peter Scott, NASA/JPL/Caltech
brain on news. Any questions? | (p...@euclid.jpl.nasa.gov)
Rik Harris
>What guidelines are there for finding out who to contact if there's
>a problem with a URL? For instance, in NCSA Mosaic the Ultrix man
>pages aren't accessible to me, and the Hytelnet/Library Catalogs/US
>Community Colleges [http://info.cern.ch:8002/us0/us000com] contains a
>typo disabling one link. I try to look around and find clues, but they're
>rather slim; the best I could come up with was the mosaic-x@ncsa address
>and the Hytelnet author, neither of which sounds exactly right. And I
>rather doubt that postmaster@<URL site> would be appreciated.
I'd like to see a common mail alias at every site that serves web
documents. Here we have "webmaster" and "www", but I'd be willing to
add any other sensible aliases. This alias could go either to one
person who has a good idea who controls all the documents on the
system (there may be many authors providing data), or to everyone who
is providing documents.
rik.
--
Rik Harris - rik.h...@vifp.monash.edu.au || Systems Programmer
+61 3 560-3265 (AH) +61 3 565-3227 (BH) || and Administrator
Fac. of Computing & Info.Tech., Monash Uni, Australia || Vic. Institute of
http://www.vifp.monash.edu.au/people/rik.html || Forensic Pathology
Hans de Graaff
Rik Harris <rik.h...@fcit.monash.edu.au> wrote:
>p...@euclid.JPL.NASA.GOV (Peter J. Scott) writes:
>
>>What guidelines are there for finding out who to contact if there's
>>a problem with a URL? For instance, in NCSA Mosaic the Ultrix man
>>pages aren't accessible to me, and the Hytelnet/Library Catalogs/US
>>Community Colleges [http://info.cern.ch:8002/us0/us000com] contains a
>>typo disabling one link. I try to look around and find clues, but they're
>>rather slim; the best I could come up with was the mosaic-x@ncsa address
>>and the Hytelnet author, neither of which sounds exactly right. And I
>>rather doubt that postmaster@<URL site> would be appreciated.
>
>I'd like to see a common mail alias at every site that serves web
>documents. Here we have "webmaster" and "www", but I'd be willing to
>add any other sensible aliases. This alias could go either to one
>person who has a good idea who controls all the documents on the
>system (there may be many authors providing data), or to everyone who
>is providing documents.
We're trying to solve this by adding a standard footer with the author
and date of last modification automagically. This way it should always
be possible to identify the author of a certain page, and he/she can
be mailed to correct the problems. (We also do have the overall
aliases)
Hans
--
Hans de Graaff J.J.de...@IS.TWI.TUDelft.NL
Delft University of Technology Department of Information Systems
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
<a href=http://www.twi.tudelft.nl/People/J.J.deGraaff.html>click me</a>
Tim Berners-Lee
> In article <rik.74...@daneel.rdt.monash.edu.au>,
> Rik Harris <rik.h...@fcit.monash.edu.au> wrote:
> >p...@euclid.JPL.NASA.GOV (Peter J. Scott) writes:
> >
> >>What guidelines are there for finding out who to contact if there's
> >>a problem with a URL?
You can never a priori know whether the URL is broken (bad link
in the source document) or whether the destination document has
a problem. If you suspect the destination document,
then mail webm...@the.www.site. If you think a link is
wrong, then the guy who wrote the link should have signed
the document -- mail him. If he hasn't signed it,
but he has left context pointers up the tree, then he may
have signed his overview document.
Tim BL
Marc VanHeyningen
>p...@euclid.JPL.NASA.GOV (Peter J. Scott) writes:
>
>>What guidelines are there for finding out who to contact if there's
>>a problem with a URL? For instance, in NCSA Mosaic the Ultrix man
>>pages aren't accessible to me, and the Hytelnet/Library Catalogs/US
>>Community Colleges [http://info.cern.ch:8002/us0/us000com] contains a
>>typo disabling one link. I try to look around and find clues, but they're
>>rather slim; the best I could come up with was the mosaic-x@ncsa address
>>and the Hytelnet author, neither of which sounds exactly right. And I
>>rather doubt that postmaster@<URL site> would be appreciated.
>
>I'd like to see a common mail alias at every site that serves web
>documents. Here we have "webmaster" and "www", but I'd be willing to
>add any other sensible aliases. This alias could go either to one
>person who has a good idea who controls all the documents on the
>system (there may be many authors providing data), or to everyone who
>is providing documents.
Yup, webmaster is a reasonable address and a convention for all
(most?) server sites. But webmaster here gets mail about documents
which quite clearly indicate their author; stuff should initially go
there if possible. (Then again, Marc A. probably gets comments about
documents served from here. Oh well.)
--
Marc VanHeyningen mvan...@cs.indiana.edu MIME, RIPEM & HTTP spoken here
J. Eric Townsend
"pjs" == Peter J. Scott <p...@euclid.jpl.nasa.gov> writes:
pjs> there's a problem with a URL? For instance, in NCSA Mosaic the
pjs> Ultrix man pages aren't accessible to me, and the
Folks, if you're going to install xmosaic 1.2, you need to check out
and reconfigure the external references it automagically picks up.
Manuals are *NOT* your local manuals. USENET is *NOT* your local
usenet (I think it's from CERN in europe, actually).
Most of this stuff is handled in gui.c
--
J. Eric Townsend j...@nas.nasa.gov 415.604.4311| personal email goes to:
CM-5 Administrator, Parallel Systems Support | j...@well.sf.ca.us
NASA Ames Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation |---------------------------
PGP2.2 public key available upon request or finger j...@simeon.nas.nasa.gov
John Franks
> In article <rik.74...@daneel.rdt.monash.edu.au>,
> Rik Harris <rik.h...@fcit.monash.edu.au> wrote:
> >p...@euclid.JPL.NASA.GOV (Peter J. Scott) writes:
> >
> >
> >I'd like to see a common mail alias at every site that serves web
> >documents. Here we have "webmaster" and "www", but I'd be willing to
> >add any other sensible aliases. This alias could go either to one
> >person who has a good idea who controls all the documents on the
> >system (there may be many authors providing data), or to everyone who
> >is providing documents.
>
> We're trying to solve this by adding a standard footer with the author
> and date of last modification automagically. This way it should always
> be possible to identify the author of a certain page, and he/she can
> be mailed to correct the problems. (We also do have the overall
> aliases)
Would it make sense to have a new HTTP header field like the following?
Document-maintainer: John Doe <jd...@host.domain.edu>
On a related subject I would like to see browsers support the HEAD method
in HTTP/1.0 (now that I have done the work to implement in the gn server).
It could be as simple as displaying the headers to the client user on
request, before downloading the whole document. It would be convenient
to take a look at say the size of a movie before GETting it over a
slow link. Also the last modified date is valuable. Personally I think
that a maintainer field is useful, although if the URL is really broken
you won't get the header either.
--
John Franks Dept of Math. Northwestern University
jo...@math.nwu.edu
Marc Andreessen
<mvan...@cs.indiana.edu> writes:
Yup, webmaster is a reasonable address and a convention for all
(most?) server sites. But webmaster here gets mail about documents
which quite clearly indicate their author; stuff should initially go
there if possible. (Then again, Marc A. probably gets comments about
documents served from here. Oh well.)
Yup!
Actually, the latest thing people send us mail about is broken Gopher
servers...
Marc
--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
ma...@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Marc Andreessen
j...@boxer.nas.nasa.gov (J. Eric Townsend) writes:
Folks, if you're going to install xmosaic 1.2, you need to check out
and reconfigure the external references it automagically picks up.
Manuals are *NOT* your local manuals. USENET is *NOT* your local
usenet (I think it's from CERN in europe, actually).
Most of this stuff is handled in gui.c
...and gone in Mosaic 2.0, for a whole host of reasons, including the
above...
Cheers,
Tony Sanders
> Would it make sense to have a new HTTP header field like the following?
>
> Document-maintainer: John Doe <jd...@host.domain.edu>
<LINK REL="Made" HREF="http://host.domain.edu/people/doe.html">
and then have the browser POST to that URL.
> On a related subject I would like to see browsers support the HEAD method
> in HTTP/1.0 (now that I have done the work to implement in the gn server).
> It could be as simple as displaying the headers to the client user on
> request, before downloading the whole document. It would be convenient
> to take a look at say the size of a movie before GETting it over a
It would be better to just do the GET and then put a message that says
how big it is and let the user abort if they don't want it. HEAD is
more useful for saying (has this thing changed) and stuff like that,
rather than previewing information (though that is sometimes useful
also, esp if the browser can't abort a transfer).
--sanders
Frederick Roeber
> [...]
> (Then again, Marc A. probably gets comments about
> documents served from here. Oh well.)
>
> Yup!
>
> Actually, the latest thing people send us mail about is broken Gopher
> servers...
Well, that's probably just because you have such a convenient "Mail
Developers" option under the "Help" menu. If you had a "Mail Node Author"
entry -- greyed out if the node lacks the appropriate pointer -- and a
"Mail Host Webmaster" (which would actually go to webmaster only for http,
and the "standard" names for other protocols), you might cut down on this
mis-directed traffic..
--
<a href="http://info.cern.ch/roeber/fgmr.html">Frederick.</a>
Paul Lindner
>In article <23651.7...@moose.cs.indiana.edu> Marc VanHeyningen
><mvan...@cs.indiana.edu> writes:
> Yup, webmaster is a reasonable address and a convention for all
> (most?) server sites. But webmaster here gets mail about documents
> which quite clearly indicate their author; stuff should initially go
> there if possible. (Then again, Marc A. probably gets comments about
> documents served from here. Oh well.)
>Yup!
>Actually, the latest thing people send us mail about is broken Gopher
>servers...
webmaster?! blech! ftpmaster? gophermaster? nntpmaster? ircmaster?
telnetmaster?
No go on this.... I can't wait to invent the "juice" protocol, then I
can be a late night appliance :-)
Gopher+ has provision for administrators in metainformation about the
item. You could probably hack this in the anchor too, if you really
wanted to I guess:
<A admin=Paul Lindner <lin...@boombox.micro.umn.edu> ... >moocow</A>
This works for links, but not if the user just has a URL.
--
| Paul Lindner | lin...@boombox.micro.umn.edu | Slipping into madness
| | Computer & Information Services | is good for the sake
| Gophermaster | University of Minnesota | of comparison.
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