11–20 of 458 posts
Isn't the obvious missing technical component cryptographic hashes? A hash can represent any resource. IPFS, or something like it, is the missing component for long term retrieval. EDIT: or something like https://github.com/google/trillian
There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic. [1] https://github.com…
"The more libraries incorporated into the website, the more fragile it becomes" is just fundamentally untrue in a world where you're self-hosting all of your scripts.
"Prefer one page over several" is diametrically opposed to the hypertext model. Please don't do this.
"Stick with the 13 web safe fonts" assumes that operating systems won't change. There used to be 3 web safe fonts. Use whatever typography you want, so long as you self host the woff files.
"Eliminate the broken URL risk" by... signing up for two monitoring services? Why?
I think this list of suggestions does a great disservice to people who just want to be able to post their thoughts somewhere. There's an assumption here that you'll need to be technically capable in order to create a page "designed to last" and frankly that is not what the internet is about. Yes, Geocities went away. Yes, Twitter and Facebook and even HN will go away. But the answer sure as hell isn't "I teach my students to push websites to Heroku, and publish portfolios on Wix" because that is setting up technical gatekeeping that is completely unnecessary.
There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic. [1] https://github.com…
Indeed.
And I still remember the modem days where I would download entire websites because the ISP charged by the hour, and I'd read them offline to save money.
I fundamentally agree with the principle -- that pages should be designed to survive a long time -- however the steps the author lays out I completely disagree with. "The more libraries incorporated into the website, the more fragile it becomes" is just fundamentally untrue in a world where you're self-hosting all of your scripts. "Prefer one page over several" is diametrically opposed to the hypertext model. Please…
If you're worried about fonts changing out from under a site you should surely also be worried about bitrot in, say, jQuery.
Why minify SVGs, but not HTML? Aren't both gzipped by the server? Is it because you're not expected to hand-edit SVGs in this scenario?
Isn't the obvious missing technical component cryptographic hashes? A hash can represent any resource. IPFS, or something like it, is the missing component for long term retrieval. EDIT: or something like https://github.com/google/trillian
Why minify SVGs, but not HTML? Aren't both gzipped by the server? Is it because you're not expected to hand-edit SVGs in this scenario?