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> “The interesting thing is that, at that time [in the 1990s], it was easier to archive the web because everything was flat web pages,” said Alexander Rose, the
by zeveb 11y ago
> “The interesting thing is that, at that time [in the 1990s], it was easier to archive the web because everything was flat web pages,” said Alexander Rose, the executive director of the Long Now Foundation, an organization dedicated to establishing a framework for long-term thinking on a scale of 10,000 years. “So if you did save something, your chances of being able to see it and use it would be vastly better than if a company folded today, with deep back-ends of content-management systems like Drupal and Ruby and Django and all these things. The pages are not actual pages.”
This right here is something I wish all the folks building web-apps-to-display-pages would think about. It's straightforward to archive HTTP resources; it's not at all easy (nor, really, practical) to archive every API response used in building these dynamic sites. Web apps are fine, for what they are, but please, please, for posterity's sake: don't use dynamic content if you can use static content instead.
- cableshaft 11y agoI used to be all gung-ho about dynamic websites for my personal projects (I made a custom CMS for my site once), but then I started thinking about what would happen if I disappeared and if I wanted to leave my projects for other people to maintain in an easy way (assuming they even want to), and realized static content is the way to go. Now I try to do things client side and powered by data in JSON format instead of creating relational databases and requiring web servers for everything. If I can't copy it to a DVD and have it run in a browser without connecting to the internet, I don't consider it to be good enough. I do have a lot of flash games I need to figure out what to do with now that it's being phased out, though :/.
- digi_owl 11y agoAs best i recall, the first time i ran into HTML was as a content index on a demo CD attached to a magazine. Basically each demo was presented with a screenshot, a text blurb, and a link that would start the installer. All of it static pages using frames.
- blacksmith_tb 11y agoI was a little puzzled by that passage - while it might be true that the content on single-page sites would be harder to crawl / preserve, most of those apps aren't really about content, per se. And most sites that are have some kind of SEO-friendlier slug-based routing that shouldn't really be any harder to consume than a flat, static site, I'd have thought. Not to mention that now sites expose their sitemap.xml, JSON-LD, etc. that should make the job of putting the pieces back together easier than in the Good Old Days this article implies we have left forever...