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Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

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Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#501

Post by Apocryphon »

rsj_hn wrote: post #389
markstos wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States government studied this question and came to the conclusion of... acid free paper. So it's now law that "permanent" documents in the US are to be stored on acid free paper: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/perm/permpapr.... Some of us who remember the 5.25" floppy disks, the 3" "floppy" disks, the HUGE Zipdisks, the 5.25" spinning platter drives, the 2.5" spinning platter drives, then t…

Acid free paper is a big improvement, but it's not gonna last 500 years. It's expected to last 200 years. Archival acid-free paper -- paper with cotton added to it -- can last up to 1000 years, but be prepared to pay $2.50 for 1 page[1], so a 400 page book will cost you $1000 for one copy, just for the paper in the book. This type of archival paper might be useful for important contracts or deeds, or legal documents.…

Cancelling is an online-driven social phenomenon that has existed for- a decade, maybe? Rather odd to view all of human civilizational progress through the lens of one overexposed, extremely online trend.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#502

Post by endisneigh »

mleonhard wrote: post #492
jamesdf wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant…

Posting spoilers without a warning is extremely rude.

without context would it's pretty meaningless imho

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#503

Post by forgotmypw17 »

I think about this a lot, and I prioritize site longevity and compatibility in my framework. To this end, I leverage the Lindy Effect, writing HTML which works with the last 25 years of browsers, starting with Mosaic and Netscape. You want to use only the most basic, least common denominator HTML markup, to improve its chances of not becoming "deprecated".

If you use JS and CSS, it must have abundant feature-checks, and ideally be optional. Your pages should certainly be usable without JS. You probably want to go with static HTML or only the most basic, again, lowest common denominator server-side dependencies, such as SSI.

You must make your site easily indexable, crawlable, and spiderable, so that it can be easily propagated to the Internet Archive and other archiving systems. Many sites I made in the past are long gone at their original URLs but remain accessible via Wayback Machine.

That's all I can think of for now.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#507

Post by JimTheMan »

cstross wrote: post #336

The world wide web is only 28 years old. We've had computers for 76 years at this point. We're discussing this topic in modern English, but if you look back 500 years William Shakespeare wouldn't be born for another couple of generations: vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot since then, and if you look back a further 500 years (to 1021AD) the "English" spoken in those days was a lot closer to Frisian than anythi…

Ironically the dictionaries you mention have greatly stabilised language. Language is going to be far more stable over the next 500 years. I wouldn't worry about it in the slightest.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#508

Post by Apocryphon »

oceanplexian wrote: post #374
jjoonathan wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always brings me joy to read doomsday prophecies from decades, centuries, and millenia past. They were legion -- so confident, yet so wrong. I hope your predictions bring similar joy to future readers in the decades, centuries, and millenia to come.

The thing is, occasionally those predictions have been right and society reverts to a state less advanced than it was for hundreds or thousands of years. A lot of the technology from Ancient Rome, building techniques, steam engine technology, etc. were lost for thousands of years. It’s totally conceivable to me that 500 years from now scientists have access to a wealth of electronic media, but haven’t invented the co…

I really wish the Romans had invented apocalyptic fiction, in the modern sense. Would've been interesting to read what their anxieties were in non-poetic, scrutable terms.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#509

Post by capableweb »

jdsalaro wrote: post #480
ralmidani wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great comment! I’m curious, why did you choose Arabic, Mandarin, and Spanish?

They are the most widely spoken languages world wide after English.

English comes after Mandarin and Spanish according to most sources, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...

Edit: ugh sorry, I realize you wrote spoken languages (which English would be in the top at, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...), not native/first language/by population. Ignore me!

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