sigh. I just went through a round up updating one of my websites, and a part of that was just dealing with link rot ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot ). Now I understand whole websites going away when the sponsor ceases to exist, but what is so frustrating are the sites that keep shuffling everything around every few years for no apparent reason, "to improve the user experience" is just too lame an excuse for most of the changes. Worst yet are the retirement of data just because it is 'old' (aka Age discrimination) as if nobody ever keeps products running past their design life, or that newer versions actually migrated the excellent 1st generation documentation in the the current sets. I have made use of 20 year old manuals as they were the most comprehensive for what I was doing even if they missed some of the recently added features. I make a point of trying to keep all my links consistent so that even when the root domain has been switched out from under me, they rest of the links can still be used at the new location.
I try to follow Tim Berners-Lee advice in http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI as much as possible on this front.
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