People who don’t read documentation carefully tend to do a sloppy job. This does apply heavily to the Internet business, there are very, very many web page that are so horribly broken that it is a wonder that the people that have created it are allowed to do such things for a living.

But there is something that is even worse — broken search spiders. Internet Archive is indeed a nice service, but they have severe problems reading my e-mail links, not to mention the language information (even though the latter seems to have been improved since the first time I complained). There are more search spiders that do similar things, some get lost and lose parts of the links, other do even more weird things.

There are also a lot of spiders that cannot parse links properly, and think that <a href="//www.aftonbladet.se/"> is a link to a local file. If I am able to get hold of the author, I tell them about the problem, and if they then won’t correct the error, or if they won’t provide any contact information, I block them. If they can’t follow the rules of the game, they don’t get to play, it is as simple as that.