21–30 of 458 posts
This is by and large, impossible. The hoops you have to jump through and downsides you have to endure are just a death by 10,000 cuts. Try writing a tabulated container in raw HTML and CSS that flex sizes and behaves nicely with the browser back button. Partial page reloads, containers with native (no reload!) sorting, there's so many features in modern web design that are just downright impossible without JS.
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…
It's not entirely wrong, if the page is held static but the browser continues to be upgraded. If you're worried about fonts changing out from under a site you should surely also be worried about bitrot in, say, jQuery.
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…
How is viewing the WARC after? Is it the same quality as archive.is/ or archive.org/ ?
Disappearing content is a blessing, not a curse. Let it all be replaced by new people doing the same things slightly differently, instead of constantly having to confront prior art.
jeffhuang.com. 60 IN A 162.243.124.123
$ whois 162.243.124.123 | grep Organization
Organization: DigitalOcean, LLC (DO-13)
Designed to last... Hmm... Seems like a tall order for someone forced to maintain their own host.
I agree that you can (almost always) write HTML without JavaScript codes (CSS is not always needed either, but nevertheless it can be helpful). This improves portability too. If you do want to use JavaScript to generate static documents, consider using Node.js and have it output a plain HTML document, which will then be the hosted document, rather than hosting the JavaScript version. (This way, the code only has to run once.)
About fonts, I think usually the fonts are not an essential part of the document. (Still, you don't usually need to use so many, but often you do not need to specify the font at all, except you may still need to specify if it is monospace, bold, etc.) Also, you do not usually need so many pictures on your web page (except picture galleries).
I do think if you need a copy of a web page then you can copy it.
You can also use plain text documents (without HTML); it is what I often do.
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
Ugh. I thought blockchain hype was dead by now. Additionally, no it's not. If zero nodes rehost and serve the content, it's not available.