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This Page is Designed to Last

jeffhuang.com

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Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#191

Post by Normal_gaussian »

rodw wrote: post #188
incompatible wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you can last 10 years, which is apparently what "This Page is Designed to Last" aspires to, but what if we have greater ambitions? Like 100 years?

Then I think you need something like archive.org. You can design and mark-up content that will still be useful and readable in 100 years. You might be able to preserve the presentation logic (CSS-style) for 100 years. You probably won't be able to preserve the interaction design for 100 years (without a dedicated effort -- that's why they bury computers along with the software in time capsules). But I think it is opt…

Repo hosts are quite vulnerable to storage abuse as well as simply accruing genuine old content.

I can see a deletion heuristic that considers both account activity and repo activity being deployed within the next 10 years.

However I expect another evolution in SCM in the same timeframe.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#192

Post by vikeri »

One of the issues highlighted is that the ecosystem moves fast and dependencies tend to break your setup. One thing that at least partially has mitigated this problem for me is using a stack that is mature and very careful about breaking changes. Clojure is a great example of that. My gut feeling tells me that if you had a repo in Clojure that created your static pages 5 years ago (when Java 8 was released) it will still work today.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#193

Post by maple3142 »

mr__y wrote: post #18
trynewideas wrote: post #6

Why minify SVGs, but not HTML? Aren't both gzipped by the server? Is it because you're not expected to hand-edit SVGs in this scenario?

HTML may contain style and script tags. Sometimes minification may break CSS or JS - however rare that is, if you want your archive to be reliable you don't want functionality that may break something. If you intend to reduce storage space usage, HTML may be gzipped - this is "losless" so it does not carry a risk of breaking anything

If minification break your CSS or JS, isn't that the minification tools' problem?

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#194

Post by celeritascelery »

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…

Joplin is open source.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#195

Post by rodw »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #191
rodw wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I think you need something like archive.org. You can design and mark-up content that will still be useful and readable in 100 years. You might be able to preserve the presentation logic (CSS-style) for 100 years. You probably won't be able to preserve the interaction design for 100 years (without a dedicated effort -- that's why they bury computers along with the software in time capsules). But I think it is opt…

Repo hosts are quite vulnerable to storage abuse as well as simply accruing genuine old content. I can see a deletion heuristic that considers both account activity and repo activity being deployed within the next 10 years. However I expect another evolution in SCM in the same timeframe.

Right, look at SourceForge. There's a lot of broken links and/or references to no-longer accessible content in some of the older Apache.org projects too.

Also maybe cvs/svn/git repo generally don't contain content worth preserving for 100 years. There are some historically significant or interesting repos, but for the most part you'll have a bunch of unremarkable (and duplicated) code that may not have run then and certainly won't run now.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#196

Post by beachy »

hk__2 wrote: post #175
ryanfox wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been building an application to do this, except for everything on your computer! It’s called APSE[0], short for A Personal Search Engine. [0] https://apse.io

Having to pay $15/month ($180/yr!) to be able to search stuff on my own computer for years seems awfully expensive. I'd rather depend on some simple open-source piece of software that I can understand and maintain if necessary.

Decades ago there was an amazing piece of software from lotus when I worked there called magellan. I remember the first time I saw someone search, and find results in text documents, spreadsheets and many other of the common formats of the day.

That was in 1989 and today I mostly search my computer using find and grep commands, since that's what just keeps working.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#197

Post by notatoad »

ryandrake wrote: post #113
notatoad wrote: post #82

Earlier 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.

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?

It would be great if web browsers had a way to actually indicate the user's preference of typeface, but what we've actually got is the browser's preference, and the browsers almost all have chosen really terrible default typefaces. It's fine to say "just use the default" for Mac users who get a decent default, but then the poor windows users have to suffer through some terrible serif.

The users who actually know how to change the default font also know how to use stylish.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#198

Post by maple3142 »

I still don't get why not minify HTML... When you open your browser's devtool, all the HTML elements is properly formatted and interactive. If you mean "view-source:", there are tons of HTML beautifier there.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#199

Post by chaostheory »

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 problem has been solved a long time ago if you use Pinboard.

https://pinboard.in/

Just pay the yearly subscription so pinboard can cache your bookmarks.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#200

Post by rtkwe »

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?

It's partially that for most other media once you have found and cataloged a piece of media/data it's safe. Books don't disappear off my shelves. Even things you haven't gotten specific copies of generally don't disappear entirely, they may get harder but there's usually a copy /somewhere/. Things on the internet tend to disappear entirely unless they've been included in the few archiving things like archive.org.
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