Don't break existing links!

Michael Nahrath gpgweb-devel@nahrath.de
Thu, 05 Dec 2002 18:18:11 +0100


Just read the FAQ (yes, sometimes it happens :-)

The FAQ locally installed at /usr/local/share/gnupg/faq.html contains
several links to the www.gnupg.org website.

At least there are <http://www.gnupg.org/docs.html> and
<http://www.gnupg.org/mirrors.html>.

Now these URLs are 404.

Please fix this!

If it should be realy impossible to keep the old URL intact there needs to
be at least serverside redirections to the new resources.

And if even that is impossible there should be more descriptive sites on
these URLs than the current 404 message.


Second: 
Is it really neccesary to have souch strange URLs containing brackets?
Nobody uses this, there will be a lot of mistakes from not using what users
expect (you know Nielsen about this ...).

<http://www.gnupg.org/docs.html> had much better usability than
<http://www.gnupg.org/(de)/documentation/index.html>.

I'd prefer the simple and intuitive system Debian use:

<http://www.debian.org/intro/free> triggers content negotiation upon the
language set in the browser (it is also the adress that should be linked
to).
<http://www.debian.org/intro/free.en.html> forces the english version.
<http://www.debian.org/intro/free.de.html> forces the german version etc.

<http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/multi/6.html> mainly deals with Apache but
is good for the basics as well.

And something general about "moving" or "reorganizing" content away from its
original location:
<http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html>

Greeting, Michi