💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › s › Lagrange › 12042 captured on 2023-12-28 at 16:02:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I wouldn't doubt what I'm about to express having been tried, found to be too resource intensive, or just plain silly... but have any browsers ever tried having a setting that enables a mode in which the browser tests links (not fetching an entire page in the process, of course (assuming that's possible)), and shows what it considers broken/dead links in some color that means "broken/dead link"?
I'm just saying, exploring Gemini pages leads to an inordinate amount of time backing out of browser pages indicating something to the effect of "resource not found". Well, why not determine that upfront whilst loading a page if it can be done so reasonably efficiently? Or leave it up to the user whether they want to incur that overhead so they're not the one having to personally incur said overhead?
Nov 29 · 4 weeks ago · 👍 miragearchitect
🚀 clseibold · Nov 29 at 15:53:
This is slightly frowned upon in the community, mostly because it's too much automation. Although, it'd be more fine if it was a setting that's off by default and has to be manually turned on.
However, the biggest problem, imo, is that links are not guaranteed to not change state. You don't want a browser checking that a delete comment link works, for example.
Although, search engines also check links and the links they check also aren't guaranteed to not change state. But search engines don't use client certs, and so that's a big reason why it's more fine with search engines, and they look at the robots.txt.
It's not silly, but to test a link, you have to make a request to fetch the page for that link, so it will be pretty resource-intensive and generate a lot of traffic (unnecessarily). Of course you could keep track of the links you've tested and only try them once, but a dead link some day can come back alive later on, so ... Rather than a mode, you could have a keyboard shortcut to run a check on the page's links, that seems fine to me.
🍵 michaelnordmeyer · Nov 30 at 00:14:
It would me more efficient if the linking server checks its links periodicly and deals with broken links.