[LINK] lack of dates on Ausgov pages

[Craig Sanders]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 09:09:36AM +1100, Jan Whitaker wrote:
> Here's something that bugs me about published information that is
> supposedly official from govt. Why don't they have publication dates
> on them?

yes, this bugs me too. it's common on many blogs, web sites, forums,
archives, and so on. it's getting to be a serious problem now that we've
got over 10 years worth of stuff indexed by google...it is becoming
quite difficult to tell what's current and relevant, and what's ancient
and obsolete.

and sites that deliberately screw with HTTP Last-Modified headers don't
help.



and it's really obvious that they just didn't think that dates were
important...most will happily acknowledge the error and promise to fix it
when you point it out to them.  and some even do fix it quickly.

might take a little (or a lot) longer with govt, depending on what their
change management process is like.




actually, i'm surprised that govt sites don't have that information as a
required part of their standard templates - i know we do where i work (a
university faculty)...every web page published has to have the following
information at the bottom of the page:

Date Created:
Last Modified:
Authorised By: (a person or role, usually a role like "Manager, IT")
Maintainer:    (a person or role, usually a real person's name)
Maintainer's email address: (generally a role-account email addr, like 'webmaster@')

as well as the University's ABN and CRICOS provider number. and standard
links to the university's indexes and search engine, and information
pages about the school, the faculty, and the university itself.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>