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Comment by fyp | Hacker News Reader

I don't think there's any good solution to the dead link problem. For example there are 11 links in this article:

  https://jeffhuang.com/
  https://gomakethings.com/the-web-is-not-dying/
  https://archivebox.io/
  https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/25315/hotlinking-what-is-it-and-why-shouldnt-people-do-it
  https://goaccess.io/
  https://victorzhou.com/blog/minify-svgs/
  https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/images-done-right-web-graphics-good-to-the-last-byte-optimization-techniques
  https://caniuse.com/#feat=webp
  https://uptimerobot.com/
  http://www.pgbovine.net/python-tutor-ten-years.htm
  http://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

How many of these will still be alive in 10 years? How many times do you have to fix your page to make your page "last"?

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I think the Stack Overflow guidelines have "solved" this problem in about the cleanest way currently possible: expect links to die, and include the relevant information in your answer.

If the link still works when it gets clicked on that's a bonus, but it shouldn't need to be available for the content you're reading to be understandable.

And directly quoting the information has been endangered by modern copyright directives.

Will you still be allowed to do that in ten years? Or will aggressive takedown policies have forced a shift?

> And directly quoting the information has been endangered by modern copyright directives.

I guess paraphrasing or summarising hasn’t been prohibited.

> will aggressive takedown policies have forced a shift?

Shifting to prarphrasing or to summarising doesn’t sound too bad.

That's not always possible without changing the subtleties and basic meaning, or even intention as well as discussing and questionioning what the author wanted to say with their sentence or paragraph. This is particularly tricky if you write political commentary on your site. Blog post of a politician or social media posts can't be quoted where there's already vaguely stated and often said politician removes the post after backlash so you wouldn't be able to link it.

In the case of StackOverflow, if you can’t explain an answer in your own words, then you don’t really know the answer and no one should rely on your links to a supposedly authoritative source.

And there's also the HTTP 300 codes if content has been moved.

These work only if you move stuff around on the same website. If you switch domains you can't just ask the new domain owner to redirect requests to your new website.

When a website disappears completely, there is no web server to respond with HTTP 300.

Put a wayback machine link in parentheses/superscript after every link in the page?

Of course, you can't know how long the Wayback Machine itself will continue to exist, either.

I think we will simply have to assume it will continue. That is, if anything will continue, archive.org and similar projects whose primary goal is to preserve and prevail are easily the prime candidates.

and we don't know when it will be the end of the world so we should all stop breathing now

There's no great solution, but there are things you can do to help, for example:

- take an 'archive copy' of anything you link to so you can host it yourself if it goes away (copyright issues to consider, of course)

- automate a link-checking process so you at least know as soon as a target disappears

- only link to 'good' content (you can feed back results from previous step to approximate this on a domain-basis over time)

(although these things require a build process, which the article's author is against)

http://www.pgbovine.net/python-tutor-ten-years.htm seems dead already, in fact.

As many times as the article literally tells you will be necessary? One of the key points about links it makes is to use a link checker if you do link out.

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