a jaundiced eye: http://www.redundant.com/redundant/

a jaundiced eye: stuck
for wednesday, march 5, 1997.

http://www.redundant.com/redundant/

Part one of as many as I can milk it for...

One of the more annoying things about the web is its redundancy. It would be easy to blame on the marketing onslaught that has overtaken us all, but in many cases that isn't necessarily the cause. It is easy to forgive small redundancies such as

http://www.mycompany.com:80/

but the more egregious examples are hardly the fault of novices.

One such example is the use of

http://www.redundant.com/redundant/

In the early days of NCSA httpd and Apache, it was not yet possible to do true virtual hosting. So, what people did was use server side Aliasing to set a document root, such as

/redundant/

and DNS CNAME records for the host portion. It was a clever fake, but it didn't work if the visitor went to

http://www.redundant.com/

and found out it was an ISP or web hosting provider. The server was not smart enough to figure out where the visitor actually wanted to go.

This is forgiveable, but things have changed - for over a year, it has been possible to do true virtual hosting. So why does HotWired still use the older forms? Take a look at Packet, for example. Much can be forgiven or explained away by the "404 Complex", the fear of changing a link or moving files around - and possibly denying someone service - but sites continue to spring up with the same breaches of style.

Or worse.

Next issue, we take it a step further.

Steven Champeon

r e c i p r o c a t e

Permanently archived at: http://www.jaundicedeye.com/browse/stuck/030597/