One of the realities of the web is link rot. When web pages link to other pages, those links sometimes go dead, possibly because the resource URL has changed, possibly because the resource has been removed, or possibly because the entire website has closed. Bare URLs - like this - are a particular problem, writes Jenny Luca, because readers have no way to recover the original content. What about citing links with academic style, as Doug Peterson suggests? This would help in some cases, but my experiences is that resources tend to disappear completely rather than merely move, so a search doesn't really help, and a citation doesn't improve matters. Or,you could always use a service like Xenu to check your links. But in the end, accepting that the web is a dynamic entity means letting go. Things change, links rot.
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