Template talk:Dead link

Link status indication

Hi, I'm working on a script for (semi)automatic detection of dead links: [1].

There are still many issues to be solved, but it is already pretty confident at detecting 4xx errors which are being flagged with Template:Dead link. Other cases will definitely need human intervention, because the classification is not unambiguous (see [2]), so I'm wondering if we should create a new template or add an optional "status" parameter to Template:Dead link to indicate cases like SSL certificate verification error, connection refused, connection timeout, or the 5xx errors in general. I'm still figuring out how and when these should be marked, so any opinion would be appreciated.

-- Lahwaacz (talk) 16:27, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Awesome! Maybe we can add an "info" symbol like ⓘ (ⓘ) or ℹ️ (ℹ) to Template:Dead link's superscript, and report the error description in its 'title' attribute ("tooltip"). It's not mouseless-friendly though of course. -- Kynikos (talk) 15:41, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Would it be too weird if the "title" attribute is added directly to the <sup> tag? It is much easier to hover than a single character. See Template:Sandbox for example. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 10:27, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

What about both adding "title" to the whole sup tag, but also put the info character in the text: my reasoning was that we should give some sort of a hint that there is some relevant "hidden" information in the template. -- Kynikos (talk) 11:34, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

OK, like this? [3] -- Lahwaacz (talk) 12:38, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, it looks all right to me, an alternative could be to always show the status text, maybe like this^{dead link 2011-09-04
example error} but of course that increases the whole line height to further detriment of the reading experience. -- Kynikos (talk) 03:34, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

I don't like the increased line height, but we can still change the display when there are actually some links showing the status. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 11:59, 23 March 2020 (UTC)