Rules of Reference
Abstract
The web is clearly taking over as the unique publishing medium of more and more original content. Unfortunately all too often, this original content changes URLs or worse, actually disappears. It is of paramount concern that we ensure the continued existence and accessibility of this original content. This conservation is the responsibility of the publishers. These Rules of Reference describe this site’s URL and content retention policy as well as guidelines for reliably referencing content from this site.
Rules of Reference
- This site maintains two discrete URL sets, public URLs and private URLs. Much like private APIs, the private URLs are not so much secret as they are undocumented and liable to change.
- This site’s public URLs are of the form
/year/month/day/title.htmle.g./2010/10/24/rules-of-reference.html. - You may freely reference content in the public URL set of this site, hereafter articles.
- The articles on this website will continue to be available for the foreseeable future at the same URL without alterations beyond errata.
- Additionally this site believes that the layout and styles form part of the content. This site therefore pledges not to alter the surrounding layout beyond site wide announcements in the footer or header.
- This site reserves reserves the right to edit the code of articles without affecting their content, to accommodate the relocation of assets to a Content Distribution Network (CDN) for instance.
- Assets, such as figures, included in articles should never be referenced directly. Always reference the article and optionally the specific section thereof, as the assets do not belong to the public URL set and are liable to move. Assets might for instance be moved to a CDN.