Re: Accessibility of Salt Lake Olympic Site

> 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