Spot the deliberate mistak
Sep 23rd, 2008 by handolio
You know how, once you get familiarised with something, it’s hard to spot that it’s stupid? Well, every now and then you get a flash of perspective.
Earlier my brother sent me a link to a Times Online story. As sometimes happens in email, the link got broken across two lines. In this case just the final ‘e’ was removed, thus what should have been
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4807167.ece
became
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4807167.ec
I don’t know about you, but they look pretty similar to me. Clicking on them shows that The Times’ website understands the full link, but hasn’t got a clue about the one missing the letter ‘e’ - it remembers to serve you an advert on its 404 page, mind.
Why?
It might seem like a facetious question but it’s not. It’s stupid that a platform can’t recognise a link that, in all but one character, points to a valid bit of content. I can understand a sentence that misses the od leter or even a whole .
It’s easy enough to make mistakes. Shouldn’t platforms used by humans be able to deal with them?
