[arp242]

I have a lot of old unsorted bookmarks of "I want to look in to this, but don't have time now". Newer stuff is more organized, but I exported the old stuff and haven't looked at them in about five years.

Last week I started organizing them a bit, and it's shocking how much is a 404. Even from major newspapers and such. I have no idea why anyone would take down old content (outside of some specific and rare reasons). Some are also on neither internet archive or archive.today.

[al_borland]

I assume when it happens at big sites it’s from a major site design that doesn’t care to keep backward compatibility with old links.

[genewitch]

How many programmer-hours are required to have a separate page that translates between URI schemes?

Your comment, to me, implies that the 404 links' content still exists but is not at a canonical URI anymore. I'm assuming converting stuff like /2018/08/foo.html to /newscheme/fetch?foo or whatever isn't that difficult? This whole thing is one of the reasons i haven't ever set up a blog or even a website that has dynamic content, because i can't be assed to decide on a URI scheme that will "just work" with any future engine.

Someone has to have written converters, right? I know you can import some blogs to wordpress (and vice versa, export WP to other engines...)