A few links made with the Ref button from halirutan's button plug-in no longer valid

Question

Wolfram seems to be reorganizing its on-line documentation and thereby breaking some links from this site. I learned this today when Saturisk left a comment to one of my answers saying a link I'd made to a documentation page was broken. It turned out to be easy to repair, but I worry that this may be the tip of a broken-link iceberg; that Wolfram may be reorganizing all of its on-line documentation causing many links on site to soon break if they haven't already.

The old link was http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/JSON.html
The new link is http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/format/JSON.html

The change needed to restore the link was substituting language/ref/format for mathematica/ref.

The old link was made using the Ref button from halirutan's button plug-in, so users of that plug-in should take note and fix their documentation links should they fail to work.

Update

I started checking some of links appearing in rm -rf's list. The all seem to work as is. It seems redirection is working for these links and only old links that need to put into the form

http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/format/

are not being redirected. If this finding holds up, then the problem is nowhere as severe as I feared.

P.S. And it's not 'mathematica` that is causing the problem in the broken links -- it's the absence of 'format'. Even

http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/format/JSON.html

gets redirected properly. I guess this is why it took so long before a broken link was discovered -- there are really not that many. I apologize for crying "Wolfram" :-)

Answer 1

I just wanted to point out, that there is absolutely no intelligence in the ref-button! Although one cannot completely understand the whole code from this snippet, I guess it becomes clear anyway what it does

ReplaceMarkdown(
  'Mathematica Function (like Integrate, Plot, ..)',
  '[`#INPUT#`](http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/#INPUT#.html)',
  function(answer){ return answer.replace(/^`(.*)`$/g, "\$1" ); })

The function was never intended to work always but as a thing that helps very often. I already pointed this out in my original post:

If you look at the URL style of e.g.

http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Plot.html

you see, that Plot can be exchanged with most other Mathematica functions and it works, because most of them have a reference page. Now wouldn't it be awesome if we had an additional button on the editor toolbar which when clicked transforms the marked text PlotStyle into PlotStyle? This won't work for all functions but I'm sure, it helps quite a lot.

I know I don't have to defend this, but what I wanted to point out is that it was planned from the beginning, that you have to check every inserted reference when you use this button.

On the other hand, if WRI now starts to change some URLs, there is nothing we could have done in the first place. Changing a published API (or in this case documentation) for such a large software is one of the worst things you can do.

Finally, if the button is supposed to work correctly, then there is IMO no other way except hard-coding the valid URLs for all possible functions, options, import/export formats, etc.. which would be quite a large list.

Answer 2

Here's a list of all questions and answers on the site that contain a link to http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica. The list is sorted by views, so that we can start fixing the most helpful/viewed ones first. There are about 3.5k posts that have the old URLs.