Ancient Web: Dan's Web Tips Told Authors Not to Break Their Own Links

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

The earliest Web had no shortage of pages teaching people how to add blinking text. Dan Tobias was more interested in teaching them not to break the rest of the Internet.

Visit Dan's Web Tips.

The site's homepage gives its first creation date as July 13, 1997. Tobias presents it as advice for people already familiar with HTML who want to avoid the subtler mistakes of amateur site maintenance. The contents read like a catalog of arguments from the browser wars: physical versus logical markup, default index files, META tags, validators, image handling, frames, CSS, new windows, and whether a page truly needs an automatic refresh.

The writing is opinionated, practical, and sometimes quite funny. It does not try to be a complete HTML manual; it tries to save people from themselves.

The danger of making your site prettier

In Dealing with Changes, Tobias asks webmasters not to casually rename files or directories during a redesign. Other people may have bookmarked deep links or written articles that point at them. If an address must change, he explains, use an appropriate permanent redirect and try not to make visitors land on a generic homepage. His examples mention Apache configuration, .htaccess, 404 reports, and the difficulty of getting other site owners to update links.

The page also contains a true museum piece: instructions for checking inbound links through AltaVista. Such advice records how a webmaster once tried to diagnose an ecosystem of independently maintained pages. The underlying principle survives even if the search engine does not.

Another article on cross-browser failure started with Netscape quirks and has since acquired crossed-out names for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome. Tobias explicitly labels some of the old specifics as historical while maintaining the general argument: just because a page works in the browser you tested does not mean its code is correct.

A lot of this predates responsive design and the modern JavaScript application stack, but the larger problem is unchanged. Websites exist in a network of dependencies: readers, browsers, bookmarks, search engines, and other websites. A private design decision can break somebody else's path through that network.

Tobias's warning to preserve URLs is particularly apt because his own guide is still online, carrying both old arguments and later annotations instead of replacing its past with a sterile rewrite.

Read the advice on preserving old links.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.