Disclaimer

- and Hints on how to find a "broken" URL

"Everything passes, everything changes, just do what you think you should do." --Bob Dylan, "My Back (Home)Pages"

"If you break the link in this chain, 1000 years of bad luck will befall you."--typical chain letter curse.

The World Wide Web (like the real world) is a constantly changing place. Home pages, sometimes whole sites, can suddenly disappear or alter radically. Once a link in the chain of references is broken, even the best-constructed hypertext connection is meaningless. As are all the other links which depended on it: you can only get there from here if "in-between" still exists.

I've tried to make this series of pages as up-to-date as possible, but undoubtedly, perhaps even as you're reading this, one or more links have vanished or changed. If you find this to be the case, let me know.

Depending on volume of use, some links may become overloaded and return an "unable to connect" message to you. ("Please dial again later. Thank you for using Internet.")

Another problem is that problems with finding things are not consistent across the Internet. In part, that's because each local Internet site depends on its own "lookup list" to find other locations. Given the rapid growth of the Internet and in particular its WWW segment, one server may have an address in its "lookup list" while another may not. Or a particular server may only have a "partial" address while another will have a "complete" one.

One thing to try if you are having problems connecting with a particular link is to "reduce the URL". Sometimes, for reasons probably best understood by UNIX gurus, a shorter URL can be looked up on a particular server, while a longer one can't.

Here's a hypothetical example. Your WWW browser is showing a "can't find" error message for "http://www.anyserver.org/hotlinks/fred/welcome.html".

Try typing in "http://www.anyserver.org/hotlinks/fred/". If that works, look around in the "fred" directory for a file called "index.html" - or one called "welcome.html" or "home.html" or "fred.html" - or indeed any file with an ".html" extension. It's worth a shot and you might get lucky.
If "http://www.anyserver.org/hotlinks/fred/" still returns a "can't find" error message, you could try "http://www.anyserver.org/hotlinks/". If that works, look around the "hotlinks" directory for a subdirectory called "fred". Then repeat the process in the previous paragraph.
As a last resort, try "http://www.anyserver.org/" and if you connect, see if you can find a directory called "hotlinks". Then, proceed as above.
Another thing that is dependent on your local server is how it deals with links to Internet tools like telnet or Newsgroups directly from a hotlink selected by your Web browser. These may or may not work according to local conditions.
Finally, depending on the kind of Web browser software you are using, you may or may not be able to use links to email, fill in on-line forms or access the full range of graphics or multimedia enhancements available from a particular page or site.
Also, if your computer is incapable of dealing with sound or colour, those aspects of the WWW will not be available to you.

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