Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Europa change web address

As is the way with these things, Europa have changed their web address to include .eu, without maintaining the links to the documents posted under their original urls. So the dozens or perhaps even in the hundreds of links I've made here to EU documents over the past four years will now find a page unobtainable error.

I'm not alone in being irritated. Unlike EU Law blog, however, I'm not considering updating the links in old posts. Life is too short. Can I suggest to frustrated readers looking at broken links that you modify the first part of the url to read http://europa.eu/ in the first instance and failing sucess through that route, try the Europa search engine (I know - not the most user friendly of the breed) with the precise title of the document you're looking for.

It's the inevitable consequence of the all too common "I've got a great idea, now Y has happened, let's do X with our big information system", without remotely considering the knock on effects. Can somebody please remind them that a system is an assembly of components connected together in an organised way. It they want to change a key component, can they please try to think about the knock on effects and the system's users? It's really not a lot to ask.

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