Dave Winer finally speaks out on the Weblogs.com fiasco, and amongst all the usual stuff I find one thing that really leaps out at me:
One of the things I learned is that just because a site is dormant doesn't mean it's not getting hits. The referer spam problem on these sites was something to behold. Search engines still index their pages, and return hits. They were mostly dead, in the sense that most hadn't been updated for several years.
Something troubles me about this and the interminable HTTP code vs. XML redirect discussions, and that's this: If someone links to the content, it's live by definition.
I'll restate that, so it's clear: Content that is used should continue to be accessible. I don't actually know where Ruby or Winer or Rogers Cadenhead or anybody but the writers stand on this, but it remains a non-negotiable best practice and first principle of web interaction design for usability that links should not go dead.
If that means you have to redirect the user to a new location when the content moves, so be it. If you have to do that with meta-refresh in HTML or XML, so be it. Sure, there are "purer" ways to handle it; but it's just stupid to let the perfect be the enemy of the good by saying that you can't redirect if you can't modify your .htaccess file. Even a lot of people with their own hosting environments aren't allowed to modify their .htaccess.
I'm getting the sense that a lot of the people involved in these debates are forgetting that the web was supposed to be about linking information to related information. Protocols and methods are mere instrumentalities to that end. It's the content that matters; there really, really isn't a web without content.
