Again, with no fear for demonstrating my copious ignorance, I’ll ask a question that might be foolish.
I’ve often seen websites where I wanted to know when the content was created/last updated. Sometimes content creators date their offerings but often they don’t. I’m always disappointed to read content only to discover later that it is outdated and superseded by more relevant data, especially when I’m learning a new topic. As far as I can discover, there is no way to determine the date content was hosted. This started me thinking (always a dangerouse move as I don’t do it well).
It occurs to me that there are a number of rules specified by the W3C. Only content that complies with the rules can be accessed by most browsers. What if the W3C required all content to contain a date of upload and all browsers to display that date prominently in a fixed location . . . perhaps as a suffix to the URL and at a (relatively) fixed spot on screens, say the upper left corner? Of course, no one would realistically propose that all existing content be invalidated (or require updating); so the W3C rule could provide for a meaningful default for it.
Does anyone else experience this frustration? Does anyone know if W3C have ever considered such a requirement? What are the downsides for content providers (and design architects)?
When a webserver sends you a website it also sends along a bunch of meta information known as headers. These arent visible on the page, but you can view them using developer tools. One of these headers is Last-Modified which contains the date and time the page was last modified. It’s not ideal in terms of usability, but the information is there.
Do note the header is not required and thus may be missing. It also maybe incorrect, as there is nothing forcing the webserver to tell the truth.
I do not know of any specification that requires publication date and don’t necessarily agree with the premise that all old information is outdated. A lot of old information is still very much relevant today.
Thank you for the information and tip about the last-modified date. I’ll see if I can incorporate that knowledge into my habits.
I didn’t mean to infer that all old web content is irrelevant. I should have said that a date of publication gives clues as to whether or not more recent information is available.
I’m not sure how relevant this is to the discussion, but I once wrote a scraper that would look at a particular web page, grab the “last-modified” header, compare it to the last time I’d downloaded something, and perform the download if there had been a modification. After it had performed the download for a few days when nothing had actually changed, I noticed that the “last-modified” header is altered by any change to the web page, and as this one included some dynamic content (which IIRC was some ASP code to show today’s date) the web server automatically updated the “last-modified” date. So the actual text could still meet the OPs criterion of being years old, but the last-modified date would still have changed.
Dynamic pages dont have a “modified date” as such, or at worst, have two distinct dates; the last time the code was modified, and the last time the data on the page changed.
If I put up a brand new page, today, reproducing verbatim Principia Mathematica, my modified date is today.
Is the information the most up to date? Depends on your definition. Is it the most up to date version of Principia? Yes. Is it the most up to date information on Mathematics? no. Is it relevant? Depends.
Is such information helpful? Yes.
Is such information required for the page to be relevant? No.
Is it going to be made a requirement? No.
Also, keep in mind that a large amount of the W3C “requirements”… arent actually enforced.
The W3C isnt a policing agency; browsers can choose to shim their way around code that doesnt comply with the the W3C requirements (try leaving off a </html> tag from your HTML, and see what your browser does - hint: It doesn’t fail to render. Or throw an error. Or do anything other than silently fix the code).
All good points; the problem is that anything can be posted on the Internet making it a better propaganda tool than any Goebels had at his disposal. Much of what is available on line is propaganda and untruth (at worst) or well meaning error (at best). Users need all the tools they can get to assess what part of the spectrum information presented falls on.
I don’t claim to have THE answer, but I’d certainly like to know that some clues are available.
This may be true, but I dont want a datestamp stuck on the corner of my page taking up real estate that could otherwise be used to present information. Or a login. Or any number of other, actually-relevant-to-the-casual-viewer things.
There’s a date printed in the front of every dictionary ever printed - but when’s the last time you looked at it before looking up the word you were searching?
Why wouldn’t I (or everyone) just write a script that automatically reuploads all of my web pages on a daily/weekly basis so the last modified date stamp is always current?
I could have the script just cycle between adding and removing a full stop at the end of each page, so the page was ‘different’ to the last version.
I can’t see that it’s the place of W3C to change the spec to include a created or last changed date on a web page, though I agree it can be annoying when it’s not included.