Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Deep Linking
Author: calvin@xmission.com Posted: 8/10/1999; 1:27:14 PM Topic: Deep Linking Msg #: 9316 (In response to 9274) Prev/Next: 9315 / 9317
>We have been linking to InfoWorld.Com since the inception >of Scripting News, we're going to keep doing it until we >hear otherwise from InfoWorld. I assume their linking >policy is an old not-updated page explaining an old >not-enforced policy. However, if they object, we will stop >linking to them in the future.This baffles me. What is the difference between www.scripting.com/index.html and http://davenet.userland.com/1999/08/10/scriptingNewsBulletins
It's path. That's about it.
Do you open the WSJ and check out the market report? Do you skip the front page? You are deep linking...wouldn't it be wonderful if the WSJ forced you to go through it's advertising section first, before you checked out your stock prices? And if a library, which has a copy of the WSJ, lets users go straight to the market report, skipping whatever pages the WSJ wanted read first, why not just sue that danged useful library for, oh, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Wouldn't that be great?
Every time I hear stuff like this it just makes me mad, and sometimes I don't know why.
Then occasionally I remember.
The web was not created to generate advertising revenue. It is a medium for publishing and sharing information. Deep linking is part of the design behind the web. The URL, uniform resource locator, is for creating deep links.
If a company wants to publish on the web, they use the medium just like anyone else, if they don't like it, do something different. But the idea, that legislating the technological behavior of a medium for only specified purposes is appalling.
If anyone can make deep linking arbitrarily illegal, then how do you write a negative story on say Bill Clinton if the White House says no deep linking to Clinton's speeches? And the press can't contrast and compare the policy statements of say two senators because the senators don't allow deep linking on their websites, or thomas.loc.gov.
"No deep linking to the spending bills, so says house majority leader. That includes no deep linking from the whitehouse.gov"
Or better yet, Salon.com can't link at all to any GW Bush website. Too extreme? Let's just say GWBush.com lets salon link to their front page which executes a cgi, and tests for the source of the link and kicks the user back to salon.com, essentially breaking the link.
Ticket master could do the same thing...to tickets.com
So, please please please, preserve the nature of the web, by opposing efforts to restrict, circumvent or control the web by individuals, corporations or governments.
And I applaud you for empowering people to use the web. That's what it's all about.
Ticketmasters behavior is dis-empowering.
Thanks for listening
-calvin
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