WLGauge — A Web Link Gauge to Measure the Quality of External WWW Links

External Broken links have a negative impact on any web page user. However, little or no information is provided in advance to advise the user of the quality of the available links before they hit them. Our contributions in this paper are: (1) To present our arguments to suggest that the external link quality is not binary (broken or available) but instead it is a continuous value from low reliability to high reliability (2) To emphasise the need for the web designers to provide some information in advance to the user suggesting the quality of the link. This approach is very similar to having the image size next to a potential loading image giving the user a broad idea about the resources needed to download that image. (3) To present a new tool called WLGauge that can measure some quality attributes of the external links in a web page. WLGauge is an open framelet that can be easily plugged on to any web site development toolbox. WLGauge has been designed with an intention to help the web designer and web maintenance teams to understand as well as improve the quality of their web pages.