URL maintenance Was: Seeking *opinions* as part of a larger research issue.

I see this discussion has veered into the area of URL maintenance in ebooks.

A successor format  to EPUB could make this easier by requiring javascript support - then external links could be routed through an update file.

In the current environment, I've advocated use of a link server (like the DOI link redirector) to provide updated or context sensitive links (but that only relocates the maintenance issue, doesn't solve it!)


Eric Hellman
President, Free Ebook Foundation
Founder, Unglue.it https://unglue.it/
https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/
@gluejar@tilde.zone

> On Jan 17, 2023, at 4:31 PM, Liam R. E. Quin <liam@fromoldbooks.org> wrote:
> 
> A URL in a long-lived document can have the problem that the original
> owner stopped paying for it and it now serves malware or phishing
> pages. So there can be security implications.
> 
> These can be avoided by using example.org, but if there's significance
> in the text of the URL that likely doesn't work.
> 
> Yes, they should be marked up as code, not as links, as there's no
> expectation of traversing them and they are not expressing a link
> relationship between the context in which they are embedded and the
> resource they may or may not represent.
> 
> So to some extent i think this follows from Web architecture and
> probably the HTML spec.
> 
> liam
> 
> -- 
> Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
> Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
> XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
> Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations:  http://www.fromoldbooks.org
>