Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Every single web page should be dated!

Every web page should have information on it about when it was created, and when it was last modified. Pages that are generated from databases should indicate how old the data is. To some extent, browsers could enforce this rule. Why don't they?

How often do you check out a review on a web page, or instructions on how to do something, without knowing whether it was posted a month or six years ago? There ought to be a law.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was there an incident that caused you to write this? (I feel the same way, though. It's a double waste of time -- reading an article i don't know is relevant and then searching for the byline.)

tobyr21@gmail.com said...

Hundreds of incidents caused me to write this. I look for reviews of products, and there's no way to tell whether they refer to a newly released product or to the 3rd version of it. Reviews often compare one product to "what's currently available" and there's no way to know what date "current" refers to.

Many other kinds of items need dates as well.
-PB