Taxing Broken Links

August 5, 2005 by

This entire day has been devoted to repairing broken links on ReadWriteThink. It’s usually not a horrible task, but this time there were dozens. It seems that that National Archives decided to do a site redesign.

Now generally, I have no problem with such things. Sites need to be redesigned periodically. They either outgrow their old system or they become dated. The thing is I can’t decide what the point of this redesign was other than annoying people. Many of the pages look identical in the redesign, but the links are broken.

Okay, I know that file structures need rethought occasionally, but these were just stupid changes for such high profile pages. For instance, some of these links are broken because they changed underscores to hyphens:

OLD: http://www.archives.gov/national_archives_experience/charters/bill_of_rights.html

NEW: http://www.archives.gov/national–archives–experience/charters/bill_of_rights.html

Your tax dollars at work. Oh, and notice that they DIDN’T change the underscores in bill_of_rights.html


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