Seems like an ad for Heroku and Wiix.
This Page is Designed to Last
301–310 of 458 posts
Re: This Page is Designed to Last
#302All the points about using simple html don't do anything for website rot.
Sites I built with tables and custom js display framework over decade ago, before people started abusing floats for layout and before js frameworks happened, still display today perfectly.
Pages die beause domains and hosting gets abandoned or because websited get upgraded without paying attention to old link format.
If you want your pages to last buy hosting that automatically charges your credit card and use a company that encourages your cc info to be up to date (like Amazon).
Also never revamp your sites just make new ones in subfolders or on new (sub)domains. And if you absolutely need to upgrade existing site pay very close attention so that it accepts old url format and directs user to correct content.
Re: This Page is Designed to Last
#303When 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…
On this subject you can dive into the story of the missing "Doctor Who" TV serials. Some tape of master's were infamously reused to store other contents. Beside the whole archive problem come from the reusable nature and scarcity of the chosen storage. I think I've read something about reusing paper as well in medieval time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes
> I think I've read something about reusing paper as well in medieval time.
This mostly happened with parchment, not paper, but otherwise you are right. It is called a palimpsest.[1] Sometimes the writing under the writing can be reconstructed as happened with the oldest copy of Cicero's Republic.[2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest
[2]: https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=3059
Re: This Page is Designed to Last
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
Google Web Fonts are not an "or", here. Fonts have disappeared from it, and there is no reason to not expect Google to, at some point in the future, go: "you know what, this costs too much without any substantial return." And now it's just another killedbygoogle.com product. Just like images, self-hosting woff/woff2 should be step 1.
His "or" was to suggest that instead of only self-hosting the font file, you simply use a google one with a "fall-back" that happens to be a super-standard font that won't reasonably disappear from most OSes in the near future. That way, you get a reasonable "best of both".
Re: This Page is Designed to Last
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
In practice how is this different from MHTML? I think most browsers have built-in support for MHTML so it should be possible to build that part easily.
According to the MHTML entry on Wikipedia, Chrome requires an extension, Firefox doesn't support it, and only Internet Explorer supports MHTML.
I used the excellent unMHT plugin for Firefox, but it got dropped some time ago, failed to meet "enhanced security requirements" :(
I still keep an old ESR with this plugin for archiving, and accessing MHTs.
Re: This Page is Designed to Last
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
>There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Indeed. And I still remember the modem days where I would download entire websites because the ISP charged by the hour, and I'd read them offline to save money.
I can't put my finger on it but this has a sort of Dickensian quality to me. I think this says something kind of profound about information and capitalism and whatnot.
No, it hasn't. Technology just wasn't there back then which caused significant cost per time unit, which makes it only fair to charge per time unit.
Re: This Page is Designed to Last
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
When you go to a restaurant you let the chef prepare food for you. Telling him to back off and let you cook because he can't know better than you (his user) would be absurd. Same thing with design and typography. It requires skill and taste, and hopefully people will be delighted or simply consume the content for what it is, because the design/cooking just reveals that content in a convenient/useful shape.
Most fonts picked by designers suck. Plain and simple. I override fonts for most websites I frequent.
Re: This Page is Designed to Last
#308The author says: "that formerly beloved browser feature that seems to have lost the battle to 'address bar autocomplete'." But at least in firefox, if you type "*" then your searched terms in the URL bar, it actually queries your bookmarks ! There are many such operators, you can search in your history ("^"), your tags ("+"), you tabs ("%"): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-keyboard-sh... My favorite…
Not sure you're aware of this one too... But, you might like the "Ctrl+Tab" shortcut as well. With it you can alternate between the last few active tabs, with thumbnails. Really handy.
I don’t think I’ve come across a single Firefox user that ever uses keyboard shortcuts that has left it that way—all have found the “Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order” preference and turned it off, so that it goes through tabs in order, like literally every other program I’ve ever encountered does with tabs. (Yes, Alt+Tab does MRU window switching, but that has never been the convention for Ctrl+Tab tab switching.)
Mind you, MRU switching is still useful behaviour; Vim has Ctrl+^ to switch to the alternate file which is much the same concept, and Vimperator et al. used to do the same (on platforms where Alt+number switched to the numbered tab, rather than Windows’ Ctrl+number), no idea whether equivalent extensions can do that any more. I have a Tree Style Tab extension that makes Shift+F2 do that, and it suits me.
Re: This Page is Designed to Last
#309I 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…
> "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).…
I disagree with keeping fonts inline in the page. It means an additional 100kb per page at the very least. Which adds up very quickly. Remember that most of the world still doesn't have broadband (including yourself if you're using roaming services abroad). It also means extremely redundant information is transmitted when people watch more than one page on your site.
Re: This Page is Designed to Last
#310I agree with all the points except for "Obsessively compress your images". The same argument as point 2 ("Don't minimize that HTML") applies: It's an extra step in the queue, and you lose some quality in the result.
Besides, bandwidth and storage will only get cheaper. Unless you have a site that contains thousands or more images, chances are you won't really notice the difference the compression makes.
Maybe for preservation we should even go in the other direction instead: Make every image a link to a full-size non-resized version of the image with optimum quality.