Nick Jenkins wrote:
If I go to http://en.wikipedia.org/Tokyo (note the missing "/wiki"), I get a 404 page that contains a 5 second-client side refresh tag like so: <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="5; URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo">
Is there any chance we could follow the great example of the PHP folks, and immediately give the user what they really want (e.g. http://php.net/date , which instantly shows the user the content of the http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php page) ?
I nixed that because then you've got scary unstable URLs being linked to. The URL system may change, potentially dramatically so, and they'll no longer work. (But I'm a bit of a stickler about stable URLs on articles.)
The PHP manual example is particularly dangerous because they don't even issue an HTTP redirect, it just spits the content right back. Bad for caching and for linking.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)