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

81–90 of 458 posts

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#81

Post by tempestn »

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…

This was what made me convert from bookmarking to clipping pages into Evernote around 6-7 years ago. I realized I had this huge archive of reference bookmarks that were almost useless because 1) I could rarely find what I was looking for, if I even remembered I'd bookmarked something in the first place, and 2) if I did, it was likely gone anyway. With Evernote I can full text search anything I've clipped in the past (and also add additional notes or keywords to ease in finding or add reference info).

Since starting with replacing bookmarks, I've moved other forms of reference info in there, and now have a whole GTD setup there as well, which is extremely handy since I can search in one place for reference info and personal tasks (past and future). Only downside is I'm dependent on Evernote, but hopefully it manages to stick around in some form for a good while, and if it ever doesn't, I expect I'll be able to migrate to something similar.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#82

Post by notatoad »

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…

>Use whatever typography you want, so long as you self host the woff files.

or use Google Web fonts, and set let last option in your font-family to be "serif" or "sans-serif" to let an appropriate typeface be used if your third-party font is unreachable. That's the beauty of text, the content should still be readable even if your desired font is unavailable.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#84

Post by saagarjha »

kccqzy wrote: post #75
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…

Safari used to (and still) do this automatically but in a limited way. In the browsing history view (Command Y), you can search visited pages by its content, and this is extremely useful. But there's no way(†) to tell Safari to display that saved content. If you revisit a URL in the history, Safari fetches it again, losing the original saved content. (†): short of direct plist manipulation

Does it actually? I thought history was stored in a SQLite database and only kept the URL and page title.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#85

Post by juststeve »

XML tools should be able to validate the HTML locally, as these pages have already been "rendered" ahead of time.

And it would be interesting to see some stats on the types of pages that are returned for the broken links. Are they returning HTTP 404s? 30x? 200's, or 500's? Does their site even allow for 300 redirection?

But it makes sense to reduce infrastructure to serve static content, which are all points of failure anyway, or at least a maintenance burden.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#88

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

every wrote: post #47

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...

Kinda sounds like you don't link to any other content, though (I guess you can include links in plain text, but that's a bit of a pain for your readers) which means your site doesn't really fit the use case.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#89

Post by [deleted] »

fouc wrote: post #4

Webpages should be archiver friendly. Imagine sticking a proxy between our browser and the internet that automatically archives all webpages we attempt to browse to, and then only lets you view the archive. How much of the internet would you be able to see?

[deleted]

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#90

Post by tomtomtom777 »

The problem is clear but the solutions presented don't seem to help all that much.

This is why I hope for a future with content-based addressing, as used in bittorrent and IPFS.

Bittorrent has its focus set on files, and IPFS is becoming a bit convoluted but the core idea is very powerful.

Immutable content persists by "pinning". And even if the author no longer wants to maintain the resource, there are likely some "users" that will (eg. linked pages). And even if there is little interest from users there are still archiving services that might want to keep it. Persistent unless it's so vile or irrelevant that even archiving services ditch it.

All addressable by the same content hash.

Post reply on HN