Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This Page is Designed to Last

jeffhuang.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 458 posts

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#61

Post by makapuf »

Thorentis wrote: post #54

I find it an interesting social phenomenon that the finite nature of content on the Web is lamented, when content has been temporal for all of human history.

Carved stone is a bit more durable that that nice Myspace page was, however. Yes it was not widespread and was difficult to setup but millennia of duration is nice.

I think that the medium, be it a hosting site or you own domain, will fail. What we need is maybe : a naming scheme that can transfer to different people (replicated files on different servers indexed by content hash? Aka anonymous ftp mirrors ... ) and common media ie readable by anyone, gracefully degrading.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#62

Post by [deleted] »

Laforet wrote: post #38
arjie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice how is this different from MHTML? I think most browsers have built-in support for MHTML so it should be possible to build that part easily.

The state of mhtml support is fairly pathetic at the moment. Firefox broke mhtml compatibility with the quantum overhaul. Chrome's mht support had been a hit and miss over the years, sometimes removing the GUI option entirely and requiring one to manually launch the browser with a special tag to enable it. The only browser with a history of consistent mhtml support happens to be....Internet Explorer, followed by a bu…

[deleted]

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#63

Post by decasia »

"I don't even know any web applications that have remained similarly functioning over 10 years"

I have a WordPress instance that has functioned flawlessly since 2007. I would call WordPress a web application (though I realize this is not the bespoke sense of the term that the OP has in mind).

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#64

Post by xwowsersx »

Maybe I'm dense, but I'm having trouble understanding what is so difficult about keeping content around. It seems like the issue of webpack and node and all the other things he mentions on the article aren't really problems with content per se. You can just publish your thoughts as a plain text file or markdown or whatever and you're good to go. I'm having a hard time thinking of types of content that are really tied to a specific presentation format which would require a complex scaffolding. A single static page with your thoughts is sufficient and should require no maintenance to keep around. I do agree though that even static site generators create workflows that get in the way. I'd love to see an extreeeemely minimal tool which lets you drop some files in a folder and then create an index page that links to those. You could argue that's what static site generators pretty much do, but they do seem to be more complex than that in practice. Remember deploying a web site with FTP? I have to say that was simpler for the average person than what we have today. I think that, in some ways, the complexity is what ends up pushing people towards FB, Medium, etc as publishing platforms.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#65

Post by tananaev »

mr__y wrote: post #18
trynewideas wrote: post #6

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?

HTML may contain style and script tags. Sometimes minification may break CSS or JS - however rare that is, if you want your archive to be reliable you don't want functionality that may break something. If you intend to reduce storage space usage, HTML may be gzipped - this is "losless" so it does not carry a risk of breaking anything

Same applies to SVG. It can contain script tag.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#66

Post by jtbayly »

carlosdp wrote: post #52

I was expecting the solution to be mirror your generated pages on IPFS ( https://ipfs.io ), so they just don't go away at all (as long as someone has them pinned). The proposed solution set seems extremely convoluted and don't actually solve the issue.

That’s quite the caveat, and speaking as somebody who has attempted it, you’ve introduced quite a bit of complexity. The whole point is that complexity militates against keeping it online. Keeping it simple, the author’s theory seems to go, is the single most effective way to make something likely to be able to be available long term.

I think he’s probably right.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#67

Post by inimino »

Zamicol wrote: post #42
wcarron wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Where is someone generations hence going to get the hash from?

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#68

Post by dpcan »

The only pages I ever go back to are the ones where I hope, or need, to find NEW content. Forums, stock art, reddit, hacker news, facebook, twitter, github (for updates).

There is really only a small subset of Internet content that will ever need to stay the same - or even should stay the same. So, while slapping an HTML file on the web is great for, say, the synopsis of a movie, I think the majority of the web can be discarded when new and relevant content needs to take its place.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#69

Post by fyp »

I don't think there's any good solution to the dead link problem. For example there are 11 links in this article:

  https://jeffhuang.com/
  https://gomakethings.com/the-web-is-not-dying/
  https://archivebox.io/
  https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/25315/hotlinking-what-is-it-and-why-shouldnt-people-do-it
  https://goaccess.io/
  https://victorzhou.com/blog/minify-svgs/
  https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/images-done-right-web-graphics-good-to-the-last-byte-optimization-techniques
  https://caniuse.com/#feat=webp
  https://uptimerobot.com/
  http://www.pgbovine.net/python-tutor-ten-years.htm
  http://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/
How many of these will still be alive in 10 years? How many times do you have to fix your page to make your page "last"?

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#70

Post by SpaceManiac »

xwowsersx wrote: post #64

Maybe I'm dense, but I'm having trouble understanding what is so difficult about keeping content around. It seems like the issue of webpack and node and all the other things he mentions on the article aren't really problems with content per se. You can just publish your thoughts as a plain text file or markdown or whatever and you're good to go. I'm having a hard time thinking of types of content that are really tied…

It seems like in practice the biggest problem is "it got deleted", and everything else is about either preventing others from deleting your stuff or preventing yourself from deleting it out of laziness or frustration.

Deploying a web site with (S)FTP works as well as it ever did... and is just as obscure to non-technical people as it ever was. Ease of use means loss of control.

Post reply on HN