Quick startIntroductionWhat is Big Brother?What Big Brother is not

What Big Brother is not

When a webmaster removes a document from his site, he can either remove it for good, or replace it with a page containing a short explanatory message. Similarly, when he moves a document to a new location, he has a choice between configuring his Web server to provide clients with the new address (this is called automatic redirection), or replacing the document with a short page containing a link to the new location. In each of these two situations, if the first choice is made, then Big Brother can identify that the document is missing or has moved and alert you about it. If the second choice is made, there is no way for Big Brother to distinguish the explanatory message from the expected document, so the error will remain undetected.

Besides, one should point out that Big Brother is not an HTML syntax checker. Its job is to verify links, and most errors in your HTML documents will go unnoticed. This is a probably a good thing, since syntax checking is a difficult task, and an entirely different job. Big Brother is very lenient and accepts anything that looks remotely like HTML text.

Finally, Big Brother has a few limitations. The main one is that it does not support ftp links. This problem might be remedied in a future version.


François Pottier, May 5, 2004

Quick startIntroductionWhat is Big Brother?What Big Brother is not