Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paper doesn't have a great record over a 500 year timescale. The collection of the Metropolitan Museum has an API https://metmuseum.github.io/ and I went fishing a few months ago for images to print onto 8″x8″ squares and it's clear that older objects pick up damage over time. There are all kinds of beautiful objects from ancient Egypt but they are not made of paper. A print from the 15ᵗʰ century looks like https://w…
> Many of my favorite images come from paintings that are about 100 years old, such as the Futurists. Sounds interesting! Mind sharing links to some of your favourites?
Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
131–140 of 825 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#132Nobody can say whether browsers, IP networking, DNS, HTTP will exist in 500 years from now, so aiming for very long-term "hosting" isn't feasible, with browsers the most complex and fragile part. Your best bet to preserve digital text and other data would be to use standards specifically designed for preservation/reuse that made it during that time when we still had multilateral standards development, and that have stood the test of time, such as SGML and XML. Or use plain text/markdown/other Wiki syntax and render to the viewer app of the day and century, the idea being that capturing your text at the intentional authoring stage would be free of delivery concerns and artifacts as best as it can (possible with SGML out of the box). And/or, author/render to a conservative HTML subset without JS and progressive/optional CSS. Or, print it out on acid-free paper with mineral colors.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#133dumb thought: I was thinking if it is possible to beam info into space/somehow have the backdrop return it. Doesn't make sense, you'd need to know the formula/changes with space as it expands but yeah.
I'm not literally talking about radio waves or something. I mean to use space as a medium to write on but "how". As in you send light to specific things that would return it and account for shift/losses over time.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#134If page is static - engrave it in a titanium plate, possibly as a QR code of sorts and pass it through generations. Include instructions for reader to publish it to whatever media analog of today's web page. So basically stay away from technology, get information encoded into lowest and most resilient physical material and rely on future generation to publish and/or update it's content.
Microsoft’s research’s Project Silica was doing interesting things on etching glass for long duration archival.
https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/ignite-project...
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#135Print to PDF, store on archival quality CDs and/or print to archival quality paper.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also the fact that human language will also change over the course of 500 years 500 year old English is nothing like English today
It’s still intelligible, though. One thousand years is about the accepted timeframe for a language to be no longer mutually intelligible for speakers at either end of that period. Of course, it’s entirely possible the rate of change within a language is not static over millennia.
...but the world wasn't a global village back then. A thousand years on, the world may look more similar than diverse, and less divergent / more convergent than it did over a similar time frame in the past?
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#137You can't. No more than you can make a garden last 500 years without people tending to it regularly. Digital has a lot of great advantages, but permanence isn't one. Will DNS even be used in 500 years? Maybe. Will whatever hosting provider you use still exist. Almost definitely not. Will html and css and javascript still be used even? Or will they be something academics study the way we study latin and greek today?
Books, buildings, and art survive 500 years and not much else.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#138I've toyed with the idea of putting money into a trust and having the executors of the trust use the money to maintain stuff like this. It's more of an institutional solution than a technical one, but I'm personally more comfortable with an institution lasting 500 years than an unmaintained piece of hardware or software. It's the same strategy used by museums--they take a grant from somewhere (from government, public…
IANAL but I believe "the rule against perpetuities" is one of the sticking points in using something like a trust as an institutional solution to this problem.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm emptying out a storage bin with 25+ year old stuff that begs to differ. Storing things has a cost, actually storing things so they last, far more so. Even historians curate and don't keep everything.
But they won’t need to delete anything. Imagine the storage and data science in 500 years. Probably the whole internet of 2021 will fit into a 2521 usb stick
My 600 GB of Photos begs to differ (I've worn out camera shutters!), you can't find anything without a long search. If you can't find it, you don't own it... so yes, in theory it's there, but nobody will access it, ever... so does it really exist any more?
It's back to the same meta that everyone else says... you have to make something that people want to have around in 500 years as a first step, or you're just pushing against very poor odds.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#140Look at what has lasted 500 years, and use those media. Websites are not among them. 1) stone 2) books if printed on the right kind of paper 3) metal if it's not something subject to rust Even if it is possible to make a website that lasts 500 years, I expect we haven't figured out how yet. I'm sure it took people a while to figure out how to make long-lasting tombstones; early North American ones were often made out…
I recently saw headstones with photos on them. Now I’m thinking about writing a bunch of stuff and encoding it in a QR code on a headstone. The QR code is likely to be replaced with something else, but maybe if it says “QR Code” under it they could snap a picture and figure it out.
I can see future archaeologists classifying QR Codes as an “ornamental technique popular in early Plastic Age cultures“.
Somewhere a crackpot conspiracy theorist group will be trying to claim that the QR Codes contain messages from this long-lost civilisation…