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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

Meta: the URL is not offline, the (web) service associated with it is. The title would be better with "URL" deleted, in my opinion.

I hope they resolve the attack issues, that's of courses incredibly crappy and I feel sorry for them. :(

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It’s wrong as interpreted literally, but I’m not sure of a better way to concisely express it. Deleting URL seems to just make it more ambiguous.

"The British Library website has been offline due to cyberattack for 10 days" feels more natural to me.

That’s what a url being offline means and is understood to mean

The store is closed vs that store location is closed. Same thing

Colloquially perhaps, but it is wrong from a technological perspective, and IMO that matters.

The URL https://www.bl.uk/ is working fine, but the site is busted.

It returns a resource but I wouldn't say it's working.

I found it confusing - if a URL is "offline", I'd expect some kind of error message like connection refused or no such domain. The URL here is not "offline", it's the BL that's offline, and the BL isn't a URL.

If it displayed the Cloudflare 502 Bad Gateway error page, would you consider the URL to be offline?

There's no Cloudflare here, but I see it as conceptually the same thing.

Custom vs default error page

Sounds like a middle manager adding technical terms to sound more... technical.

Not really, since in the context of a store, "location" often refers to an instance rather than it's location coordinates.

A better analogy would be saying the store's address is closed. Doesn't make sense.

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