OT No dates on conflicting webpages.

[micky]

OT: I've complained before about the lack of a date on more than half, maybe more than 3/4s, of all webpages, and here's an especially bad example.

I asked the web, Does Medicare pay for second opinions and the first page I looked at

implied that it would pay, but only for 2nd opinions prior to

*surgery* and it said it would "help" pay for 3rd opinions if the first two were different. I figured a government page would have a Revision date, but no such luck.

This page doesn't just imply. It says "Medicare will pay for you to see a doctor and get a second opinion if:a doctor has recommended that you have surgery or a ?major diagnostic or therapeutic procedure.?" So it includes before major diagnostic and therapeutic procedures.

It also said "Medicare will pay for a third opinion if: the first and second opinions are different." Nothing about "help" to pay.

But it had no date either, so I don't know which are the old rules and which are the new.

How come most webpages have no date?

[Ed Pawlowski]

Medicare should be up to date so no date of publication is needed. Note that the second page you refer to is NOT the government Medicare page but an independent organization. They may or may not be accurate.

I take "help" pay for means the usual 80% coverage. If you have a supplement, contact the carrier for their policy on coverage.

[Robert Green]

Because web designers are lazy "artistes" who know that dating their page will let the public know how infrequently they are updated. It really is a problem and sometimes using the "View Source" option will reveal a revision date in the source-code if you're patient enough to search.

I slam "webistes" (that's what my boss thought web designers were called because of a typo using the word "websites") because I "were one" once. I wrote a batch file that would mark our org's webpage as "last updated" with the system date minus a random 1 to 4 every week. It effectively stopped the complaints from people like you! (-:

[Gordon Shumway]

I can't speak for your statistics but as far as your examples are concerned I'm ashamed you don't know the answer. Everybody else knows... it's Bush's fault!

[dadiOH]

No idea but if you want to know when the page was last updated, go to the page and paste this in the address window...

javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

Your browser has to be enabled for java scripts.

[dennisgauge]

Who cares?

In your example, you point to one page which is an official government website, and another page which is maintained by a non-authoritative third party.

You should completely discount anything the third-party page says and only consider the government page as authoritative.

[DerbyDad03]

I'll consider the government page as authoritative as soon as I can call a government office (e.g. the SS administration) and consistently get the same answer from 2 or more representatives. It's scary how often you get 2 different answers to the exact same question just by calling back and asking again.

[NotMe]

Call Medicare on the phone. If that fails call the local office of your congress critter. Ask to speak to the constituent liaison person.

[NotMe]

Call the local office of your congress critter. Ask to speak to the constituent liaison person.

[Ed Pawlowski]

I'd not bother with some phone droid. Print out the web page in case you need it.

[clare]

Not only different, but mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed.

[micky]

You make three good points below, but.....

There are an awful lot of webpages out there, more than one on the same subject I think, and I can easily see some of them getting missed during the updating process.

In addition, not from my own personal use (which is not much) but from the news I guess, I get the impression that coverage has grown and in very few cases been cut back. Or course the second webpage might never have been right.

True, but like Derby says, the government stuff can be wrong too, at least when you call them on the phone. Maybe less so on the web, but it gives me no confidence that it starts with a grammatical mistake:, "A second opinion is when a doctor other than your regular doctor gives ... " It shoudl be: A second opinion is an opinion given by a doctor other than your regular doctor...."

That too makes a lot of sense, except I havent' seen other places where they talk about helping to pay, and considerign they never or almost never pay 100%, they ought to be using that word all the time.

Thanks everyone for all the adivice. Whichever page is right is good enough for me. If I have to pay some on my own, I will.

But I wish more pages, not just medical ones, would have dates.

[micky]

Thanks a lot. But it didn't do anything.

I sure think so, but I used to know where to check and I can't find it there now. Firefox/Tools/Options. I checked every tab. and can't find anything about javascript.

Except for rare occasions, FF is the only browswer I use.

Can't find anything in the control panel either.

[Robert Green]

Works for me in Firefox. Opens up a little alert window over the page being viewed. Cool trick, DadiOH! Oddly enough it even works on pages where I don't permit Javascript. Are you entering javascript:alert(document.lastModified) into the URL window at the top and then clicking on the "GO" arrow?

[DerbyDad03]

While the doc.lastmodified may tell you the last time the page was modified, I don't think it's a valid method to determine if the information is current.

It tells us when the page was modified, not what was modified.

[micky]

I think I did and I'm sure I did these past few times, but it still doesn't work for me. Thanks, Dadi, anyhow.

Yea, true, but it would be better than nothing. It would work well in one direction, if the date is old. Ignoring for a moment the assumption that governement pages are more accurate than non-goverment, or if this weren't a government question, iIf even one of the two pages I looked at had a hand-written revision date, and the other had this computer modification date and the mod date was older than the Revision Date, I could with assurance ignore the mod date page.

I hope you guys put dates on any pages you write.

Another thing people don't do is put the year, even when they have the month and day. One time I wanted to go to a hamfest but didn't have the flier and maybe I didn't know about arrl.org at the time. I found online several announcements of the hamfest, all for different dates, but none had the year. I could only tell which year one was by checking which year the date came out on a Sunday.

[Robert Green]

Agreed, it has its limitations. But if you come up with a 2009 date, you've at least got a clue that the information is probably "a bit" stale.

[Robert Green]

I suspect web page designers are loathe to put it dates because it means people will write in and say "You don't seem to have updated this site since

2009." That's why I wrote a program to keep updating the "created on" date on a website I created so that it appeared to be just a few days old. (-:

[Wes Groleau]

Put the URI into archive.org and They'll show you what it looked like on different dates.