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This Page is Designed to Last

jeffhuang.com

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Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#41

Post by JohnFen »

waiseristy wrote: post #21

"Return to vanilla HTML/CSS" 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…

I am hesitant to put words in the author's mouth, but I suspect he would agree with my stance here...

The solution is to not require things like partial page reloads, etc. This shouldn't be a huge hardship -- a properly designed modern site can degrade gracefully anyway, so users that don't have or allow things like JS can still use it, even if in a "degraded" form.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#42

Post by Zamicol »

wcarron wrote: post #11
Zamicol wrote: post #8

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.

I had no intention of bring up "blockchain", only that cryptographic hashes must play an important part of any archival scheme intended to last generations.

Otherwise you must trust that an archiver hasn't changed history. Why trust when you can verify?

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#43

Post by pvg »

shasheene wrote: post #7

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…

You can ask Safari to do that by enabling 'Reading List: Save articles for offline reading automatically'. It's not WARC but it is an offline archive. The shortcut is cmd-shift-D which is almost the same as the bookmark one. It's also the only way I know of to get Safari to show you bookmarks in reverse chronological order. And it syncs to iOS devices.

This could be done in better and more specialized ways, one problem is browser extension APIs don't provide very good access to the browser's webpage-saving features.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#44

Post by JohnFen »

9dev wrote: post #25
doublement wrote: post #12

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.

This - so, so, much. I don't know where the assumption that everything is worth preserving comes from. To me, this is even part of the beauty of the internet: Things appear, then vanish again.

Often, the antique content is irreplaceable. If it disappears, then valuable and important reference material is lost forever. Consider, for example, if you are working with hardware or software created decades ago -- if information about such systems is lost, you're pretty much hosed.

As another example, I keep every line of code I write (that wasn't written for an employer) forever. I often pull up code that I've written decades ago to use in new projects.

The beauty of the internet is that the old and the new aren't mutually exclusive -- there's plenty of room for it all.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#47

Post by every »

With the exceptions of my root index.html generated by the tree command and the subdirectory listings handled by apache, my entire site is plain .txt files. Should be good for a while...

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#48

Post by steveklabnik »

shasheene wrote: post #7

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…

https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs describes extracting brower history to create an archive via a batch job.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#49

Post by est31 »

mark242 wrote: post #14

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…

> "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.

There are more problems though. older library versions might be vulnerable to XSS attacks, or use features removed by browsers in the future for security reasons (eval?). Or you might want to change something involving how you use the API but the docs are long gone. Generally, libraries imply complexity and when it comes to reliability, complexity will always be your enemy.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#50

Post by est31 »

scrollaway wrote: post #39
est31 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the MHTML entry on Wikipedia, Chrome requires an extension, Firefox doesn't support it, and only Internet Explorer supports MHTML.

I mean, it's not any worse than WARC support…

Maybe MAFF's are best as they use compression instead of base64 encoding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Archive_Format
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