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Date:      Tue, 8 Feb 2005 11:57:48 +0100
From:      Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony@wanadoo.fr>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: favor
Message-ID:  <1903327238.20050208115748@wanadoo.fr>
In-Reply-To: <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNKEENFAAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com>
References:  <1401586003.20050206121941@wanadoo.fr> <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNKEENFAAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com>

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Ted Mittelstaedt writes:

> My feeling is that if a site is extremely difficult to navigate
> within - such as many news sites (ie cnn.com, etc.) that this
> encourages deep linking.  If the site owners don't want deep
> linking then they can make their sites easier to navigate within.

I tend to agree.  It would be much better if these sites provided some
easy way to reference specific articles, but often the only way to do so
is with a 3000-character URL (and very often the URL still contains
things like the session ID or user name of the person who originally
pulled up the article).

> Putting a 5 minute Flash presentation as the index page of a site
> is guarenteed to provoke deep linking, for example.

A Flash page at the entrance to a site is the number-one sign that the
designer of the sign was a totally clueless newbie.  I usually just
leave a site that has this glaring defect.  If I really need something
from the site, I Google specifically on that site to find a deeper link
that gets past the Flash content, or I look at the source of the Flash
index page and try to find a URL that points past the entrance (although
sometimes there's nothing at all--I guess blind people aren't welcome at
such sites).

I'm happy to say that my own site can be navigated even with lynx.  Only
one or two pages require any kind of scripting to work correctly.  The
rest will work with plain text.

> Also, if you do have a decent site, and still have problems with
> referring sites deep linking to you and not changing those links
> when you politely request them to do so, it's pretty easy to
> replace the deep link with a html page that
> redirects to your site index.

I've done that occasionally for deep links directly to images; I've
never bothered with links to other pages.  Every page contains
Javascript that will reload the frames if they aren't there, just to
help put any deep-linked page in its proper context (they can turn
scripting off, of course, but few people do that).

> Do any not?

I don't know.  The ones I've looked at apparently do.

> If they are using it as a component of their site, then I think it does.

Probably.  But I just configure the server to send them an image that
they really don't want to see, and they remove the link soon enough.  I
don't see it very often, but from time to time I'll see the logs filled
with direct links from someone else's site, and then I have to do
something.

-- 
Anthony




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