> You know why the web is broken? Because nobody cares.
I agree with this.
404s aren't a technical problem, they are a maintenance problem. If there was time, budget or interest to fix it, the 404 wouldn't have existed in the first place.
But I don’t think fixing broken links is at the top of our priority. Many links need to be broken. And I’m glad my old stuff isn’t around. Hopefully much of my new stuff will go away too. I think this is just humanity’s process - to sift through it all and hang on to the pieces people want to save.
You can recover a lot of value from recovering old links that would take a lot of effort to replace.
Doesn't that assume that all things on the internet are permanent? Why should that be the case? If I have a page on my website and I decide to delete it then I should be able to do that. Having links that pointed to it return a 404 is correct. 404s are useful. They convey real information.
Sites that do things like 302 redirection to the home page when the link is apparently incorrect are annoying - you can never tell if the page is really gone or if the website has incorrectly bounced you to the home page.
>Indicates that the resource requested is no longer available and will not be available again. This should be used when a resource has been intentionally removed and the resource should be purged.
Still no. That kind of thing calls for a 5xx error.
> Sites that do things like 302 redirection to the home page when the link is apparently incorrect are annoying
You seem to be operating on the assumption that this thing is doing something that it doesn't do.