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This Page is Designed to Last

jeffhuang.com

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Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#111

Post by Polylactic_acid »

sneak wrote: post #96
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…

It would be nice if we had browsers that were actually user-agents that allow full pluggable customizability for all cookie, header, UI, request, and history behavior. Then, this would just be a plugin that anyone could install.

And then people install garbage extensions that break the browser and people think "Wow, this firefox browser is so buggy and slow" and switch to chrome. And then your extensions break with every single browser update because they are tampering with internal code.

Everyone is free to fork a browser and apply any changes they want. Allowing extensions to change anything at all essentially is the same as forking and merging your changes with upstream every update.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#112

Post by charlesdaniels »

tempestn wrote: post #81
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…

Shout out to https://joplinapp.org/

I was an Evernote user when I was on macOS. When I switched to Linux, a proper web clipper was something I really missed. I'm now on Joplin and it does everything I used to use Evernote for and then some.

It even has vim bindings now!

As far as longevity goes, I think they got their archive / backup format right - it's just a tarball with markdown in it.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#113

Post by ryandrake »

notatoad wrote: post #82
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.

Or don’t specify any font at all and leave it up to the user’s preference. Why presume you know better than the user?

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#114

Post by juststeve »

Well, a new HTTP status code or header could be created for sites that are closing, then if a browser navigates to the website, it could prompt the user for action? e.g. update bookmark, archive, or email site admin (if on the hosting side).

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#115

Post by nayuki »

cosarara wrote: post #76
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…

Firefox actually purges history automatically. For instance, the oldest history I have on this browser right now is from January 2018. I found about this the hard way.

I noticed this behavior in Firefox too. So I started writing personal Python scripts to scrape FF's SQLite database where it stores all the browsing history information.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#116

Post by Avamander »

kccqzy wrote: post #78
cosarara wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox actually purges history automatically. For instance, the oldest history I have on this browser right now is from January 2018. I found about this the hard way.

Safari does the same, even though I tell it to never clear browsing history.

I think Chrome(ium) does as well. Very annoying tbh.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#117

Post by sjy »

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…

> 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.

Don’t most web servers do this already?

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#119

Post by tjchear »

zzo38computer wrote: post #102
masswerk wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd include lists and tables for data presentation. Also, we may want some (additional) tags to manage footnotes and references (these were in SGMLguid, but didn't make it into HTML.)

O, yes, we forgot that. Footnotes, lists, and tables, are good too.

What about img? It's not inconceivable that an article or a reference manual should have images of some kind.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#120

Post by sjy »

inimino wrote: post #67
Zamicol wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From the link they clicked on. The article is about link rot, not search.
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