Organisation of files in the new site

[Frerich Raabe]

On Thu, 01/30/03 at 18:30, Neil Stevens wrote:
> On Thursday January 30, 2003 03:26, Chris Howells wrote:
> > On Thursday 30 January 2003 15:39, Neil Stevens wrote:
> > > Breaking links is not something we're going to do for a matter of
> > > taste.
> >
> > Oh yeah I forgot -- we're breaking stuff anyway -- on the old site it's,
> > contact.html, on the new site contact.php, so moving the stuff around
> > before the site has gone live causes absolutely no problem.
> 
> The fact that there is an error on the current site is not a reason to make 
> more errors.
> 
> Maybe you don't actually use kde.org, maybe you don't point people to it, 
> but some of us do.  And by breaking the urls, you will break every single 
> link to these pages, and make a lot of work for a lot of people.
> 
> You mentioned finding pages?  Well, I'm confident that most people find KDE 
> pages in one of a few ways:
> 
> 1. www.kde.org
> 2. google
> 3. links from other pages
> 
> Your idea will not improve any of those, and in fact will break two of the 
> three.

I think Neil is right, if you change the links, there need to be relays so that
the old adresses don't cause a 404. The hierarchy and filenames of a web site
are a little bit what the public interface of a software library is; if you
have a critical number of clients, you need to maintain it in order not to
break things for too many people.

Just look at how many hits http://www.kde.org/anoncvs.html (which is dead since
months, nowadays just a relay to some page on developer.kde.org) still gets.
Just google for link:contact.html and see from how many places that file gets
referenced.

- Frerich