Here is one of the general rules for Internet software:

You cannot count on other people not screwing up.

(You can barely count on you not screwing up.)

Any time you talk to the Internet, you have to assume that someday,the other end will do something that it isn't supposed to by thespecification. People are endlessly creative, which means that sooneror later someone will get pretty much anything wrong that it's possibleto get wrong; for example, they will use permanent HTTP

One of the things that I wish Linux package managers like yum and Apthad was a convenient way of retrieving the original, stock version ofsome file and optionally reinstalling it into its original place. I'dexpect (and wouldn't mind) that this would require re-downloading theoriginal package that the file came from (and thus it was restrictedto packages that were still in the package repository and hadn't beenobsoleted and removed by some more recent package).

You might wonder what use this

In theory, well behaved syndication feed readers are supposed to noticewhen the URL that they are polling changes; when they see a permanentHTTP redirect, they should update the feed URL. I recently ran into adownside to this behavior.

One of the online webcomics sites that I read bits of recently failedto renew its domain name in time. While the domain name was overdue forrenewal, the registrar redirected all URLs on the domain's website to amore or less generic domain parking and advertising page on a