Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: January 22, 2002
Latest Update: January 22, 2002
Faculty:
jeannecurran@habermas.org
Olivier at tapcourse@yahoo.com
takata@uwp.edu

When URLs Don't Work

Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individaul Authors, January 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

One small typo can make an URL inoperable. How can you tell whether the site has disappeared, which does happen, or whether a typo is preventing your reading the URL?

Here are some tricks I try. An URL came in this week in the midst of an ideological discussion and how teaching transforms discourse. Because the discussants were caught up in the issue, it seemed unlikely that the URL should be defunct. One discussant suggested that she used the URL to make students aware of the left's concerns for humanitarian aid to others and within our own country.

The URL didn't work. http://www.socrates.berkeley.edu:3333/budget/budget/html Try it. You'll see.

The first thing I noticed was that this was a separate server at Berkeley, socrates. Lots of times separate servers like that don't include www in their addresses. So I tried:

http://socrates.berkeley.edu:3333/budget/budget/html That still didn't work. But it did give me a different error message. Instead of the message that it couldn't find the server, no DNS entry, this time it found the server, but said file not found, the requested URL was not on that server. So I looked for another clue.

The html at the end of the URL stands alone after the forward slash /. But html is a file designation that says the document is written in hypertext markup language. So usually it occurs in the format filename.html. I looked at the URL and decided to try budget.html. Maybe someone hit the / key instead of the . key. So I tried: http://socrates.berkeley.edu:3333/budget/budget.html

It worked! Problem solved.

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