I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
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I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
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Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#2This is a very important reason why books, in general, contain better information that websites. On websites, people care a lot less about the correctness of the information. You can just update stuff later (of course, this doesn't always happen).
Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a while that a site went down and I just can't find the information anymore.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#3Linkrot is a real problem. Especially for those sites that disappear before the archive can get to them.
On another note, the more dynamic the web becomes the harder it will be to archive so if you think that the 1994 content is a problem wait until you live in 2040 and you want to read some pages from 2017.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#4This is a very important reason why books, in general, contain better information that websites. On websites, people care a lot less about the correctness of the information. You can just update stuff later (of course, this doesn't always happen). Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a while that a site went down a…
I have this problem too, thankfully archive.org has been able to resurrect most of the text based sites I bookmarked ages ago. Such an invaluable resource.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#5A similarly really annoying thing is when you find old technet articles, stack overflow questions, or blog posts that seem potentially really useful, but that have broken images, broken links, etc... so the content (possibly extremely useful at the time) is completely useless now.
It really stresses the importance of directly quoting / paraphrasing the content you want in your plain text, and not relying on external resources for posterity.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#6Linkrot is a real problem. Especially for those sites that disappear before the archive can get to them. On another note, the more dynamic the web becomes the harder it will be to archive so if you think that the 1994 content is a problem wait until you live in 2040 and you want to read some pages from 2017.
Turns out the solution to every stack overflow post will be
"JavaScript is required"
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#7I mean, this isn't all that surprising. Not unlike buying a twenty-year-old visitor's guide to a city and finding that a number of the shops and restaurants have closed, the stadiums have different names, etc.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#8This is a very important reason why books, in general, contain better information that websites. On websites, people care a lot less about the correctness of the information. You can just update stuff later (of course, this doesn't always happen). Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a while that a site went down a…
> Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a while that a site went down and I just can't find the information anymore.
I had the same experience and that's why I made a browser extension that archives pages when you bookmark them. (https://github.com/rahiel/archiveror)
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#9Man, I really miss FTP. I remember when you would just FTP to the site you were using and grab a binary from their /pub/. Mirrors were plentiful, and FXP could distribute files without needing a shell on a file server.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#10A similarly really annoying thing is when you find old technet articles, stack overflow questions, or blog posts that seem potentially really useful, but that have broken images, broken links, etc... so the content (possibly extremely useful at the time) is completely useless now. It really stresses the importance of directly quoting / paraphrasing the content you want in your plain text, and not relying on external…
Wikipedia also hit pretty hard by link rot, nice thing there at least is that volunteers can try to fix it