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This is one of the MAJOR failings of the web, that urls are not persistent, and most web admins do not bother to setup redirects to the new location when things change.

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John-Mark Gurney

@encthenet

Jun 30

Google for all it's CI/CD work can't even have tooling to verify that the URLs in it's own documentation aren't 404. Or even put in a redirect to the correct when an old url disappears.

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We take great take to do this for the GrapheneOS sites but there are serious browser limitations. We had to make github.com/GrapheneOS/gra to handle section redirects. It's a missing HTML feature. We link to a proposal which would have been a nicer way to handle these redirects.

github.com

grapheneos.org/redirect.js at main · GrapheneOS/grapheneos.org

Main website servers. Contribute to GrapheneOS/grapheneos.org development by creating an account on GitHub.

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I'm a little more forgiving of fragments not working as long as it takes me to the correct page, but as I see with grapheneos, you moved data off a page, and so fragment detection was necessary.

Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

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@encthenet

If it's moved within the same page, it's possible to create additional elements to provide legacy anchors but we don't really want to add a bunch of those and it doesn't address moving content across pages. It's going to be very common for us to move sections between pages.

2:57 AM · Jun 30, 2022Twitter Web App

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and

For example, content may get moved between the features overview, usage guide and FAQ pages. It's also likely the FAQ and usage guide will end up needing to have portions split out into other pages since they're going to keep growing and some content may deserve a dedicated page.

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and

This also happens a lot on Wikipedia as another example. Sections are renamed and moved between pages. Those anchor links end up breaking and you often get sent to a page where the content isn't present anymore or has been completely redone / renamed so it's hard to find it.