Broken links help?

[hellraiser]

what are broken links on a website?, why do they happen?,
how to mend them?, do these hyperlinks have any life?, I use DW
and when I use check links options it shows a few broken links, but the
site seems to work fine, any ideas what is happenning?

[Charles]

Post the URL.

[KDLA]

What it could be is that snippets of the code are left in the file after editing:

<a href="newfile.htm">View Our Latest Version</a><a href="oldfile.htm"></a>

If you're using DW's Design View only, when you delete things, you may not be deleting all the related code, thus the leftover snippets. They aren't linking actual text (so you can't see them) but are just pieces of code "floating" out there for DW's Link Checker to detect.

Change your view to code view, then look for all the <a href=""> (green-colored) tags. See if you find any that refer to documents you've moved or deleted.

[Tweak4]

Basically, "broken link" means a link that doesn't point to an actual file. In KDLA's example, it is from a code snippit that wasn't properly removed, but there are plenty of other causes.
If I find a really cool picture at http://bobsneat-o-rama.com/coolImage.jpg, and put a link to it on my site, then everything is fine. But if Bob later decides to remove the image, then my link is immediately "broken", since there is no longer an image at the end of the url I linked to (and I would instead get a 404 error).
Make sense?