And here I thought the
And here I thought the idiotic debate about "deep linking" was over. Apparently The Dallas News feels otherwise. (Uh-oh, that's a deep link… hope Wired doesn't come after me… :rolls eyes:)
It's already been determined by a federal court that deep links do not violate copyright laws and are not deceitful (by their nature, anyway -- theoretically it's possible to create a situation in which this is not true). Therefore TDN's only real complaint is that it's costing them the ad revenue from people failing to hit their front page.
I have two responses to this: 1. So what? Do you expect other webmasters to do your webmasters' jobs for them? If your webmasters can't figure out a way to make ad revenue from actual article pages, then they ought to be fired on the spot. 2. Can you imagine a Web without deep linking? Where either every link has to be followed by a paragraph of explanation on how to get to the actual resource the writer wanted to reference (e.g. "Go to the Washington Post home page, click on Science, look for articles from 4/23/02, it's the one titled "Hamster writes sequel to War and Peace."), or else is completely useless (e.g. This article is really interesting. Which article??)? What kind of a worthless, unnavigable Web would that be?