This Page is Designed to Last

I am all for archiving important web content, but imo most of the web content is not important and impossible to archive anyway. Too many pages use dynamic content which make web archives useless. Also having too much data just dilutes the useful stuff.

If you have useful content (the author should) store it in some other way. Put articles in any simple markup format like markdown in git, distribute videos using torrent and so on. For some types of content I couldn't think of a good solution yet. For examples JS games or applications should be in some self-contained single-file "web-executable" format. Images need to be embedded often, so torrent is not a good medium, but they don't belong in git also. So not really sure where to put them...

Also make sure to use standardized formats with proper structure. Browsers should remove quirk modes and flat out refuse to render anything which cannot be interpreted 100% unambiguously.

Webpages are always just a temporary distribution medium. They should never be the original storage place.

Sorry if all of that sounded a little bit rant-y, but I think the current web is a very bad state.

HTML is a terrible authoring format. CSS is a terrible everything. If you want something to last, the thing that will last is the human-created source - probably markdown.

I'm not worried about my blog posts sitting in their git repository being lost. The Jekyll pipeline that adds a Javascript header/footer might go away, as might the Javascript that pretifies my raw posts, but the markdown is durable, and a future archivist could always regenerate a pretty version from the markdown - or even read the raw markdown.

Give browsers a good way to view markdown, give site creators a good way to link to canonical source for their pages, and then we'll have durable links.

>Let's be honest with ourselves. The best way to make your content last for a long time is to host it on a platform that is free and very successful. For example, whatever photos I posted on Facebook 12 years ago? Still alive and kicking. The articles I've published on wordpress.com 7 years ago? Still in mint condition, with 0 maintenance required.

You view on timeline is too short. We're not talking about keeping something online for 7 years, but for 70. If I had followed your advice a few years ago, I would have deployed on Geocities. Do you know what happened to those websites?

The question is, is wordpress going to be around in 70 years? No one knows. But that static HTML page will still render fine, even if it is running in a backward compatibility mode on your neurolink interface.

here's another option to throw into the mix...

ward cunningham's federated wiki https://wardcunningham.github.io/

No need of proprietary code and apps why not build it into browsers. I have seen Firefox and Chrome can download web pages. So it will be nicer if they can download the bookmarked pages and store in a local html, css, image folder. I think it's pretty easy to achieve.

Also people need to move away from those esoteric reactjs, angular, vuejs and plethora of CMS as API or static site generators relying on some js framework which won't last even 2-3 years. Use a static site generator which can generate a plain html, like static site generators built on pandoc, python docutils or similar.

Personally I like restructuredText as the preferred format for content as its a complete specification and plain text. So the only thing in this article I will change is that content can also be in rst format and then generate html from it. Markdown is not a specification as each site implements their own markdown directives unlike restructuredtext specification and most of the parsers and tooling are little different from each other.