The growing problem of “link rot” and best practices for media and online publishers by Leighton Walter Kille.
From the post:
The Internet is an endlessly rich world of sites, pages and posts — until it all ends with a click and a “404 not found” error message. While the hyperlink was conceived in the 1960s, it came into its own with the HTML protocol in 1991, and there’s no doubt that the first broken link soon followed.
On its surface, the problem is simple: A once-working URL is now a goner. The root cause can be any of a half-dozen things, however, and sometimes more: Content could have been renamed, moved or deleted, or an entire site could have evaporated. Across the Web, the content, design and infrastructure of millions of sites are constantly evolving, and while that’s generally good for users and the Web ecosystem as a whole, it’s bad for existing links.
In its own way, the Web is also a very literal-minded creature, and all it takes is a single-character change in a URL to break a link. For example, many sites have stopped using “www,” and even if their content remains the same, the original links may no longer work. The rise of CMS platforms such as WordPress have led to the fall of static HTML sites with their .htm and .html extensions, and with each relaunch, untold thousands of links die.
Even if a core URL remains the same, many sites frequently append login information or search terms to URLs, and those are ephemeral. And as the Web has grown, the problem has been complicated by Google and other search engines that crawl the Web and archive — briefly — URLs and pages. Many work, but their long-term stability is open to question.
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Hmmm, link rot, do you think that impacts the Semantic Web? 😉
If you can have multiple IRI’s for the same subject, well, you can have a different result.
Leighton has a number of suggestions to lessen your own link rot. For the link rot (as far as identifiers) of others, I suggest topic maps.
I first saw this at Full Text Reports as: Website linking: The growing problem of “link rot” and best practices for media and online publishers.