Re: Request to restore broken links

Hello Justin,

> On 6 Mar 2018, at 06:02 , Justin Clareburt <justcla@microsoft.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi
>  
> Recently some of the pages in the w3c.org website had URL changes.
> This has broken the help facility offered by Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017 (when pressing F1 while the user has focus on certain HTML tags inside the editor).
>  
> Some examples:
>  
> For <img> tags:
>  • Previous link: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/embedded-content-0.html#the-img-element
>  • New link: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/semantics-embedded-content.html#the-img-element
> For <a> tags:
>  • Previous link: https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/text-level-semantics.html#the-a-element
>  • New link: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/textlevel-semantics.html#the-a-element
>  
> Request:
> Is there a way you can help us restore our customers’ experience?
> Some ideas include:
>  • Reverting the pages to their original URLs
>  • Providing a redirect for users who hit the old URLs?
>  
> Perhaps there are other solutions.

Thanks for writing.
I have reached out internally and we’ll let you know as soon as possible.

Coralie

>  
> In more detail:
> When a user asks for help on an HTML tag (ie. by pressing F1), we direct them to a static URL that is defined in a configuration file, which is built into the released versions of Visual Studio. There are 126 links to various anchor tags within several files on the w3c.orgsite. Many of these links point to the same page, but with different anchors.
> We’ve noticed that the anchor names have not changed with the new URLs. But the filenames have changed.
>  
> A plan for the future:
> Future versions of Visual Studio might include a different way of linking to specific parts of the W3C site. One options is for us (Microsoft) to create dozens of Forward Links and change them as the W3C site changes. Another option might be for the W3C site to provide an API that we can use with appropriate parameters to have the user directed to the right place in the site. I’d love to discuss these options for a future release of VS2017. But it would be great if we could get a quick fix for the VS2015 users who can never be updated, and the VS2017 users who are broken today.
>  
> Thanks for your consideration.
>  
> Justin Clareburt
> Senior Program Manager
> Visual Studio - Web Development Tools

--
Coralie Mercier  -  W3C Marketing & Communications -  https://www.w3.org
mailto:coralie@w3.org +337 810 795 22 https://www.w3.org/People/CMercier/

Received on Wednesday, 7 March 2018 18:19:14 UTC