dangling link

English

Noun

dangling link (plural dangling links)

1. (Internet) A URL which does not point to any webpage or file; a dead link.
   • 2014 November 12, Alex Fitzpatrick, “4 Things You Might Not Have Known About the World Wide Web's Inventor”, in Time‎^[1], New York, N.Y.: Time Inc., →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2023-03-15:

     Earlier hypertext arrangements kept a record of every single link in the system to avoid "dangling links" — links pointing to nothing. But creating the Web at scale meant users would have to be able to delete documents without telling every single other user about the deletion, even if that document was being linked to from elsewhere. Berners-Lee "realized that this dangling-link thing may be a problem, but you have to accept it."