This Page is Designed to Last

>if I even remembered I'd bookmarked something in the first place

I had recently participated in a discussion on the problem of forgetting bookmarks[1].

Copying my workflow from there,

1. If the entire content should be easily viewed, then store via pocket extension.

2. If a partial content should be easily viewed i.e. some snippet with link to entire source, then store in notes (Apple).

3. If the content seem useful in the future, but it is okay to forget it; then I store it in the browser bookmarks.

But, my workflow doesn't address the problem raised by Mr. Jeff Huang; if Pocket app or notes disappear so goes my archives. I think self hosted archive as mentioned by the parent is the way to go, but I don't think it's a seamless solution to a common web browser user.

[1]https://needgap.com/problems/57-i-forget-my-web-bookmarks-qu...

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

HN is a good candidate to be included in his example, it's been the same for 12 years?

> "Stick with the 13 web safe fonts" assumes that operating systems won't change. There used to be 3 web safe fonts. Use whatever typography you want, so long as you self host the woff files.

Indeed. 10 years ago, “font-family: Georgia, Serif” was guaranteed to work and look the same on pretty much all computers out there. Windows had all of the “web core” fonts (Georgia, Verdana, Trebuchet, Arial, even Comic Sans). Macintosh computers had all of the “web core” fonts. Even most Linux computers had them because it was legal to mirror, download, and install the files Microsoft distributed to make the fonts widely available.

In the last decade, Android has become a big player, and the above font stack with Georgia will look more like Bitstream Vera than it looks like Georgia on Android.

The only way to have a website have the same typography across computers and phones here in the soon-to-be 2020s is to supply the .woff files. Locally (because Google Webfonts might be offline some day). Either via base 64 in CSS or via multiple files; I prefer base 64 in CSS because sites are more responsive loading a single big text file than 4 or 5 webfont files. Not .woff2: Internet Explorer never got .woff2 support, and we can’t do try-woff2-then-woff CSS if using inline base64.

Even with very aggressive subsetting, and using the Zopfli TTF-to-WOFF converter to make the woff files as small as possible, this requires a single 116 kilobyte file to be loaded with my pages. But, it allows my entire website to look the same everywhere, and it allows my content to be viewed using 100% open source fonts.

Then again, for CJK (Asian scripts), webfonts become a good deal bigger; it takes about 10 megabytes for a good Chinese font. In that case, I don’t think it’s practical to include a .woff file; better to accept some variance in how the font will look from system to system.

Edit In terms of having a 10-year website, my website has been online for over 22 years. The trick is to treat webpages as and to use scripts which convert text in to the fairly simple HTML my website uses for body content (the scripts can change, as long as the resulting HTML is reasonably constant). CSS makes it easy for me to tweak the look and fonts without having to change the HTML of every single page on my site, but as the site gets older, I am slowing decreasing how much I change how it looks.

The solution to this designing web pages to last will have huge overlap with the missing layer of services on top of free and open source software. If that ever gets kissed into existence...

I wish I had every single personal journal/notebook whatever of every human who ever existed (copyright protections granted). Dont you? Socrate's, the diary of simple seaman in Columbus 4th voyage, the diary of a lesbian peasant in 15th China, can you imagine that? How better would be our understanding of the past and how many jewels would be preserved. Sure, lots of junk, but as the saying goes: One Mans Junk is Another Mans Treasure