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Posted by Doug Laidlaw on September 1, 2007, 9:12 am
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André Gillibert wrote:
> David Cox wrote:
>
>> I found some details on a musical festival, made my plans, and only found
>> out by chance that the site was two years out of date.
>>
>> Is there some HTML way of setting a lifespan on a webpage on creation so
>> that, should the creator neglect to remove it, browsers will not render
>> it?
>
> Removing a site is rather a bad idea, even when it's "obsolete".
> The solution is to date documents and clearly display the date at the top
> of the page.
> Then, people who find it, will immediately see the context, and may still
> find it valuable.
> If the site maintainer is nice, he may even update the site when the
> festival is over, and diplay clearly a banner: "Event passed -- this event
> is now kept for historical purposes only".
>
>> If not should such a mechanism exist?
>
> For simple server side removal:
>
> If you're the creator, this only depends on your server-side tools.
> You may write a Web server that automatically removes old documents (a
> pretty bad idea).
>
> If you're not the creator, and you think the contents of the page should
> be removed, send a mail to the webmaster.
>
> For a user-agent:
> There's no standard HTTP header field for telling the user agent that the
> page is obsolete.
> You may search with google for an HTTP extension, or define your own
> "X-Obsolete-after: date-time;" HTTP header field.
>
> More simply, you may write a user-agent which recognizes the hCalendar
> microformat, and doesn't load the page, or display a big red warning, if
> all events in the calendar have passed. If may also display a different
> type of warning, if some events are currently running.
> Of course, the page author has to use an hCalendar.
> It's impossible to automatically get the end date information if the
> author didn't specify it somewhere.
>
> I didn't write any Firefox extension (so I cannot tell what can or cannot
> be done with it), but that *might* be feasible with a Firefox extension.
>
> Reference:
> http://microformats.org/wiki/hCalendar
I can agree with leaving the page there, from a page I found, on research
that would take 5 years, and the page was 5 years old. Should be ready
right now (it wasn't.) But that fact wasn't clearly stated anywhere,
although I did find it.
Doug L.
--
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
- William James.
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