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This Page is Designed to Last

jeffhuang.com

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Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#271

Post by rusk »

atoav wrote: post #264

When I studied media science one of the most lasting experiences I had was a talk with one lady of the viennese film museum (on of the few film museums that store actual films instead of film props). As a digital native I never gave it a thought, but she told me that there is a collective memory gap in films that have been shot or stored digitally. With stuff that has been stored on film, there was always soem copy i…

> With digital technology this became much much harder and costly for them, because it often means cobbling together the last working tape players

I think something might be getting lost in translation. Could she have meant “electronic” rather than “digital” (which to me suggests digital media such as DVD etc)

This whole anecdote makes more sense to me with this substitution.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#272

Post by saagarjha »

superkuh wrote: post #227
zZorgz wrote: post #94

This website needs to scale text better on mobile (on an iPhone) so it's not hard to read. Especially for a post advocating on using vanilla HTML and how nice and powerful it is. I don't think I particularly disagree with any of the post, but I found it a little long-winded.

Catering to energy limited, heat dissipation limited, UI size and precision limited, and network limited (random rtt) smart phones is why the web has become as bad as it has.

Not really. With a little bit of effort, it’s quite possible to make websites that work on mobile devices as well a desktops.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#273

Post by temporaryvector »

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…

>Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic.

I tend to do that, I also save a lot of scientific papers, ebooks and personal notes. I've found that doing so does not help me at all. The main problem I have is that when I need to look something up (an article, a book, a bit of info) I reach for google first, usually end up finding the answer and go to save it, only to find that I had already found the answer beforehand (and perhaps already made clarifying notes to go along with it) and then forgot about it.

This, and not dead links, is the fundamental problem with bookmarks for me. Not only bookmarks, it extends to my physical notes and pretty much everything I do. If I haven't actively worked on something for a couple of months, I forget all about it and when I come back to it I usually have to start from scratch until I (hopefully) refresh my memory. Some of it is also usually outdated information.

I think this is a big, unsolved problem and I'm not even sure how to go about starting to solve it. I can envision some form of AI-powered research assistant, but only in abstract terms. I can't envision how it would actually work to make my life better or easier. It would need to be something that would help blur the line between things I know and things that are on my computer somehow. If I think of my brain like it has RAM and cache, things I'm working on right now are in the cache and things I've worked on recently or work on a lot are in RAM, but what's for me lacking is a way to easily move knowledge from my brain-RAM to long term storage and then move that knowledge back into working memory faster than I can do so now. I'm not even talking about brain uploading or mind-machine interfaces, but just something that can remind me of things I already know but forgot about faster than I can do so by myself.

I am convinced that figuring out how to do this will lead to the next leap in technological development speed and efficiency. Not quite the singularity that transhumanists like to talk about, but a substantial advancement.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#274

Post by Jenz »

T-hawk wrote: post #174
zbentley wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put a wayback machine link in parentheses/superscript after every link in the page?

Of course, you can't know how long the Wayback Machine itself will continue to exist, either.

I think we will simply have to assume it will continue. That is, if anything will continue, archive.org and similar projects whose primary goal is to preserve and prevail are easily the prime candidates.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#277

Post by jmiserez »

pqs wrote: post #259
tempestn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm glad you mention Evernote. I also use it for this, and also for many other purposes. It is true that it is propietary software but it is worth mentioning that all the content can be exported as an .enex file, which is xml. So, the data can be easily exported.

>easily exported

Have you actually looked at such an xml: https://gist.github.com/evernotegists/6116886

Exported sure, it's all there. But importing that into your new favorite notes application is not going to be trivial, especially not for regular users.

That's why I've decided to stick mostly to regular files in a filesystem.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#278

Post by saagarjha »

jerezzprime wrote: post #160

I'm confused about the widely held opinion that it is paramount that all web content persist for infinity. That seems parallel to someone expecting my personal handwritten journal to be archived and available to all of future humanity. I'm not convinced that is a positive thing, nor is it a necessary thing. How egotistical do you need to be to think that your personal blog is worth persisting forever?

The things I’d put in a personal journal are certainly not what I put online.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#279

Post by saagarjha »

taftster wrote: post #165
juliend2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my large screen, the lines are so long that it's difficult to read. But other than that, it's a nice inspiration for how minimal a website can be.

FYI. The content looks real nice in "reader" mode (at least in Firefox). I kind of think this is the best approach. Write your content with as minimal markup as possible. Let the user-agent render the page in my own styling. I wish the web was a bit more like the gopher protocol, where the page markup was very minimal. Just give me the plain text (or close to it) and let my client render it the way I want to read it.…

Even better (IMO, because that’s what I do) is to provide your own markup that is reasonable, but let the underlying semantic HTML be there too so people can discard it and use their browser’s reader mode to view it too.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#280

Post by anyzen »

dragonsh wrote: post #139
charlesdaniels wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 frame…

> Personally I like restructuredText as the preferred format for content as its a complete specification and plain text.

I have used rst intensively on a project. A few years later, I would be hard pressed to write anything in ti and would need to start with a Quick Start tutorial. With all its faults, Markdown is simple enough that it can be (and is) used anywhere, so there is no danger of me forgetting its syntax (even if it wasn't much simpler to star with).

So personally I would prefer md over rst anytime.

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