Last week’s landmark ruling from the Supreme Court on same sex marriage was routinely published on the Web as a PDF. Given the past history of URL use in Supreme Court opinions I thought I would take a quick look to see what URLs were present. There are two, both are in Justice Alito’s dissenting opinion, and one is broken … just four days after the PDF was published. You can see it yourself at the bottom of page 100 in the PDF.

If you point your browser at

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databrief/db18.pdf

you will get a page not found error:

Sadly even the Internet Archive doesn’t have a snapshot of the page available.

But notice it thinks it can get a copy of it still. That’s because the Center for Disease Control’s website is responding with a 200 OK instead of a 404 Not Found:

zen:~ ed$ curl -I http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databrief/db18.pdf
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-UA-Compatible: IE=edge,chrome=1
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2015 16:22:18 GMT
Connection: keep-alive

At any rate, it’s not Internet Archive’s fault that they haven’t archived the Webpage originally published in 2009, because the URL is actually a typo. Instead it should be

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db18.pdf

which leads to:

So between the broken URL and the 200 OK for something not found we’ve got issues of link rot and reference rot all rolled up into a one character typo. Sigh.

I think a couple lessons for web publishers can be distilled from this little story:

  • when publishing on the Web include link checking as part of your editorial process
  • if you are going to publish links on the Web use a format that’s easy to check … like HTML.