- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 09:44:10 +0100 (BST)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> the inconvenience. This page will refresh in 15 seconds to the > www.saltlake2002.com home page. This form of redirect should be unecessary. It is either mediated by JavaScript, or by a form of use of the non-standard Refresh (pseudo) header that is explicitly discouraged in the HTML specification (putting a non-zero time delay doesn't change the fact that they are doing a redirect, not a slide show). I think it is mainly done because of a one tool philosophy, which fails to consider configuring the server when there is a hack to achieve the effect, on popular browsers, using code in the served resource. Very few authors seem aware of HTTP, even though the permanent redirect that this implies has been in HTTP since HTTP 1.0. (Many people learn on bundled servers that do not allow proper configuration, but any professional web design company ought to go beyond this - however other comments indicate that the web designers are only second rank, not the top end designers who really understand the medium, but the sort of designer that designs for not very web aware companies.) I'm not convinced that it produces any better a link repair rate, judging by the number of links I find to such pages, and if it were to provide a better link repair rate, then the right thing is for browsers to make the effect of a status 301 permanent redirect more obvious to the user (possibly quietly accepting redirects from http://site/directory to the correct form of http://site/directory/, as most naive users thing the two are the same - they are not - consider relative URLs).
Received on Saturday, 27 October 2001 05:38:27 UTC