26 ms·

This Page is Designed to Last

• Zamicol 7y ago
  Isn't the obvious missing technical component cryptographic hashes? A hash can represent any resource. IPFS, or something like it, is the missing component for long term retrieval. EDIT: or something like https://github.com/google/trillian https://github.com/google/trillian
  • wcarron 7y ago
    Ugh. I thought blockchain hype was dead by now. Additionally, no it's not. If zero nodes rehost and serve the content, it's not available.
    • dsypa 7y ago
      A key-value store has nothing to do with blockchain.
      • wcarron 7y ago
        FileCoin is a blockchain and is the incentivization layer on top of IPFS that allows users to rent hard drive space. It is intrinsically connected with IPFS.
        • SamPatt 7y ago
          The parent comment is still accurate. IPFS isn't a blockchain and shouldn't be dismissed for this use case, which is more or less what it was designed for. Filecoin is just for incentives, but IPFS has been running for years without it.
    • Zamicol 7y ago
      I had no intention of bring up "blockchain", only that cryptographic hashes must play an important part of any archival scheme intended to last generations. Otherwise you must trust that an archiver hasn't changed history. Why trust when you can verify?
      • inimino 7y ago
        Where is someone generations hence going to get the hash from?
        • sjy 7y ago
          From the link they clicked on. The article is about link rot, not search.
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    Someone needs to keep around your content, too. A hash means nothing if I can't find the object that corresponds to it.
• mellowdream 7y ago
  This is why I've been saving PDFs/HTMLs or even just taking screenshots of webpages I find especially meaningful or important to me... Archiving things as files this way can get kind of tedious and definitely feels primitive at times (we made the LHC but I'm here not expecting the same pages of cool interviews, designs, etc. to be up next month), but what can you do? But it's nice to know you're not alone in wanting nice things to last :)
  • kodt 7y ago
    Yes, I wish I had started doing that years ago. I went back through all my old bookmarks that I had saved from the past 2 decades and a significant portion are dead now.
  • whateveracct 7y ago
    Same here. The new iOS full-page capture + iCloud files works great for this.
    • saagarjha 7y ago
      "Printing" the page might be higher-fidelity in the amount of information it contains.
• ggm 7y ago
  pURL are hard. I have one which is an X.509 enforced pointer to a PDF which is 'terms and conditions' and the pain to ensure the link never dies (its embedded in binary objects which are long lived, and out in the world beyond our control) is non-zero. Change publishing model, change CMS, the pURL is at risk. Publication models where you pay the cost for somebody to be the archival reference make some sense. URI pointing into a store. Buckets in Google? But if you decided to move on, could you get a retained 302 redirect to point to the new home?
• fouc 7y ago
  Webpages should be archiver friendly. Imagine sticking a proxy between our browser and the internet that automatically archives all webpages we attempt to browse to, and then only lets you view the archive. How much of the internet would you be able to see?
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• JoelMcCracken 7y ago
  Often when I am trying to find a dead link I can find an archived version on archive.org. Just a reminder for anyone who it might help.
• trynewideas 7y ago
  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?
  • mr__y 7y ago
    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
    • tananaev 7y ago
      Same applies to SVG. It can contain script tag.
    • maple3142 7y ago
      If minification break your CSS or JS, isn't that the minification tools' problem?
  • falcolas 7y ago
    I would imagine it’s because one is markup of text, the other serialized image data. One potentially has meaning when viewed raw, one probably doesn’t.
  • Rexxar 7y ago
    Indeed, it should be use "plain svg" image instead. Some drawing program like Inkscape use SVG as their save format and add a lot of internal tags/properties that are just junk for other programs. Generally they offer the option to save as "plain svg" without all of this tags.
• shasheene 7y ago
  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/machawk1/warcreate https://github.com/machawk1/warcreate [2] https://github.com/machawk1/wail https://github.com/machawk1/wail [3] https://github.com/internetarchive/warcprox https://github.com/internetarchive/warcprox EDIT: I forgot to mention https://github.com/webrecorder/webrecorder https://github.com/webrecorder/webrecorder (the best general purpose web recorder application I have used during my previous research into archiving personal web usage)
  • railmeat 7y ago
    This comment misses the point. The point is to make a webpage that lasts. So people can link to it and get the page. That means making a maintainable webpage and a url that does not change. It is great that you can archive every page you visit for yourself, but that is not the same as making a lasting web. Lets make something that others can use too.
  • arjie 7y ago
    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.
    • est31 7y ago
      According to the MHTML entry on Wikipedia, Chrome requires an extension, Firefox doesn't support it, and only Internet Explorer supports MHTML.
      • scrollaway 7y ago
        I mean, it's not any worse than WARC support…
• doublement 7y ago
  Disappearing content is a blessing, not a curse. Let it all be replaced by new people doing the same things slightly differently, instead of constantly having to confront prior art.
  • 9dev 7y ago
    This - so, so, much. I don't know where the assumption that everything is worth preserving comes from. To me, this is even part of the beauty of the internet: Things appear, then vanish again.
    • JohnFen 7y ago
      Often, the antique content is irreplaceable. If it disappears, then valuable and important reference material is lost forever. Consider, for example, if you are working with hardware or software created decades ago -- if information about such systems is lost, you're pretty much hosed. As another example, I keep every line of code I write (that wasn't written for an employer) forever. I often pull up code that I've written decades ago to use in new projects. The beauty of the internet is that the old and the new aren't mutually exclusive -- there's plenty of room for it all.
• mark242 7y ago
  I 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 don't do this. "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. "Eliminate the broken URL risk" by... signing up for two monitoring services? Why? I think this list of suggestions does a great disservice to people who just want to be able to post their thoughts somewhere. There's an assumption here that you'll need to be technically capable in order to create a page "designed to last" and frankly that is not what the internet is about. Yes, Geocities went away. Yes, Twitter and Facebook and even HN will go away. But the answer sure as hell isn't "I teach my students to push websites to Heroku, and publish portfolios on Wix" because that is setting up technical gatekeeping that is completely unnecessary.
  • hinkley 7y ago
    It's not entirely wrong, if the page is held static but the browser continues to be upgraded. If you're worried about fonts changing out from under a site you should surely also be worried about bitrot in, say, jQuery.
    • falcolas 7y ago
      Or not bitrot, but ever-changing browser APIs.
      • bepvte 7y ago
        When was the last browser change that broke things like simple news websites????
        • falcolas 7y ago
          The phrases "simple" and "news websites" don't combine well these days. Even the NPR website downloads 13.2 MB of content over 91 individual requests, and takes just over 3.6 seconds to load (6.5 to finish). - CSS Stylesheets: 3 - Animated gifs: 1 - Individual JS files: 11 (around 2MB of JS decompressed (but not un-minimized)) - Asynchronous Requests: 14 (and counting) And that's with uBlock Origin blocking 12 different ad requests. That's not simple in any form. So, the possibility of something on this page breaking? High. There's a lot of surface area for things to break over time. And that's not counting what happens when the NPR's internal APIs change for those asynchronous requests.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• waiseristy 7y ago
  "Return to vanilla HTML/CSS" This is by and large, impossible. The hoops you have to jump through and downsides you have to endure are just a death by 10,000 cuts. Try writing a tabulated container in raw HTML and CSS that flex sizes and behaves nicely with the browser back button. Partial page reloads, containers with native (no reload!) sorting, there's so many features in modern web design that are just downright impossible without JS.
  • JohnFen 7y ago
    I am hesitant to put words in the author's mouth, but I suspect he would agree with my stance here... The solution is to not require things like partial page reloads, etc. This shouldn't be a huge hardship -- a properly designed modern site can degrade gracefully anyway, so users that don't have or allow things like JS can still use it, even if in a "degraded" form.
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    You probably don't need those features for content you put on your personal website.
• saagarjha 7y ago
  I've put a bit of thought of what'll happen to my website if I were to die. It's hosted on GitHub Pages right now, so at some point GitHub is going to disappear or stop offering the service. Even before that, I honestly don't know what happens to renewing payments–I guess my Google Domains payment will stop and somebody will squat on my domain soon after? archive.org might be the only thing keeping the information around…I hope I've done a good job of making it archivable; as a matter of policy, there's no JavaScript. There's a snapshot from earlier this year and it looks fine, so maybe it'll outlast me?
  • lioeters 7y ago
    I recently learned about GitHub Archive, which plans to last "at least 1,000 years". https://archiveprogram.github.com/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/ It's specifically for open source software, but I wonder if it can be spun out into personal archives or websites. --- Some years ago, I had an idea for a thought experiment called the Eternal Bit - various angles on the practicality of preserving a bit state "forever".
• lucasmullens 7y ago
  HTML is worth minifying just to get rid of comments. I don't want my "TODO(mullens): " comments to be visible to end users if possible. And gzip doesn't get rid of comments at all.
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    I enjoy seeing authentic HTML comments. Sometimes they can provide invaluable context to the page.
    • 52-6F-62 7y ago
      I agree. I can understand not wanting it in a business context, but on personal sites or open projects it’s interesting.
• capnkap 7y ago
  $ dig jeffhuang.com jeffhuang.com. 60 IN A 162.243.124.123 $ whois 162.243.124.123 | grep Organization Organization: DigitalOcean, LLC (DO-13) Designed to last... Hmm... Seems like a tall order for someone forced to maintain their own host.
  • theandrewbailey 7y ago
    As long as the same URL has the same bytes, it doesn't really matter where they come from.
• ignoramous 7y ago
  Also see, how to build a low-tech website: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143
• zzo38computer 7y ago
  I do believe that, usually, you should make it possible to be archived. (In one of a few cases where it isn't, consider if HTTP(S) is even the correct protocol for what you are doing; sometimes it isn't.) I agree that you can (almost always) write HTML without JavaScript codes (CSS is not always needed either, but nevertheless it can be helpful). This improves portability too. If you do want to use JavaScript to generate static documents, consider using Node.js and have it output a plain HTML document, which will then be the hosted document, rather than hosting the JavaScript version. (This way, the code only has to run once.) About fonts, I think usually the fonts are not an essential part of the document. (Still, you don't usually need to use so many, but often you do not need to specify the font at all, except you may still need to specify if it is monospace, bold, etc.) Also, you do not usually need so many pictures on your web page (except picture galleries). I do think if you need a copy of a web page then you can copy it. You can also use plain text documents (without HTML); it is what I often do.
  • masswerk 7y ago
    Regarding fonts, I think it's good practice to archive fonts together with your site's source, if the site relies on third party resources, like Google Fonts. (Switching the link target should be easy. Embedding a commented link to a stylesheet linking to these local resources along with the third party resource link may be of help.)
  • hashmal 7y ago
    "monospace" is a property of a given font but is not (usually) a variant of a single font family as is "bold" (font weight). While bold text is often used for emphasis and setting it to "regular" doesn't change the meaning much, using a monospace font signals specific things (often, it's used to represent code snippets, but in some contexts it can mean "work in progress"). Changing that font to a proportional one strips a lot of meaning and readability from the text. In that regard, fonts families are an essential part of the document, and not just their stylistic/emphasis variants (e.g. size and weight, which can still convey important meaning on their own. Think titles and headings.)
    • 7y ago
• vkou 7y ago
  > Well, people may prefer to link to them since they have a promise of working in the future. In a world where 95% of the google search results for <common problem> are forum threads, with everyone 'answering' the question by saying 'just google it, dumbass'[1], I don't think people - as in - the common homo sapiens - cares about the longevity of the content they link to as much as the author thinks. Quality of the content (Does it have the information you want) is king. Longevity is a 'future me' problem, and 'future me' is incredibly shortsighted. [1] Thanks, guys, how did you think I found this forum thread?
• ogre_codes 7y ago
  For this exact reason I've been pushing to use static HTML on my personal blogs and I spend a lot of time optimizing images for both retina and 1x resolutions. Basic HTML & CSS are good now, and there is no reason fairly basic content can't be stored as static pages. You can convert PHP or other dynamic pages to static fairly easily, it takes about half a day of scripting and a little time with configuring your web server. The pages load quicker and the load on your server is lower. I've long considered the idea of a permanent hosting solution, where people pay to get their content up and I guarantee it's longevity, but the business model on that is tough.
• alpb 7y ago
  Frequently appearing http://danluu.com/ http://danluu.com/ on HN is one of these sites that are absolutely minimal.
  • juliend2 7y ago
    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.
    • taftster 7y ago
      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. Markdown (or similar) would be an ideal representational format. This would push all the rendering decisions to the client.
      • saagarjha 7y ago
        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.
    • pwg 7y ago
      > On my large screen, the lines are so long that it's difficult to read. The text on the page adapts to the width of the browser window in which it is viewed. The result is that everyone can obtain the line width they prefer by adjusting the width of their local browser that is rendering the page. If the lines are too long, just pop the page out into its own window, narrow the width of just that window until the lines are at a comfortable length for you, and you'll have lines that are just right for you. This page is an example of where you are in control of how the site renders and can easily adjust it to your own tastes.
• zsgoldberg 7y ago
  This is great, but you may want to fix the color contrast on your links =)
• every 7y ago
  With the exceptions of my root index.html generated by the tree command and the subdirectory listings handled by apache, my entire site is plain .txt files. Should be good for a while...
  • oneeyedpigeon 7y ago
    Kinda sounds like you don't link to any other content, though (I guess you can include links in plain text, but that's a bit of a pain for your readers) which means your site doesn't really fit the use case.
    • every 7y ago
      Yes, it's a dead end, a cul de sac that links to nowhere. And that's exactly what I intended. But if you see something that is of further interest, highlight it and search. That will almost always produce topical results...
• biznickman 7y ago
  I was thinking about this exact subject matter the other day. We invest so much time in our digital content but what happens with death? How long can we really expect our content to last? Ultimately we are all dependent on the functionality of the internet and making a physical copy is the best way to make something last. However if we intend to not only have it last but be accessible, some of the suggestions are helpful but the most significant is: where can I host something indefinitely? Will Netlify, Github Pages, AWS, etc all be around in 50 years? 100 years? 500 years? Heck, the internet hasn't even been around for all that long. As I write this, my only thought is that you need a system of fallbacks. Frankly, this seems like a business opportunity in which the cost of the infrastructure is purchased based on some formula. DNS is configured programmatically. File locations are distributed and redundant. I'm not sure what the best approach is but one thing is certain: the page accessibility is the least of this author's issues. He just needs the site to be hosted...
• carlosdp 7y ago
  I was expecting the solution to be mirror your generated pages on IPFS (https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io), so they just don't go away at all (as long as someone has them pinned). The proposed solution set seems extremely convoluted and don't actually solve the issue.
  • jtbayly 7y ago
    That’s quite the caveat, and speaking as somebody who has attempted it, you’ve introduced quite a bit of complexity. The whole point is that complexity militates against keeping it online. Keeping it simple, the author’s theory seems to go, is the single most effective way to make something likely to be able to be available long term. I think he’s probably right.
    • carlosdp 7y ago
      None of what he wrote mitigates the case where he no longer maintains his site and stops paying for the server, which is the very reason all those links he mentioned were dead (defunct websites/hosts).
      • jtbayly 7y ago
        But if you kept it simple in the first place, you can easily do the work necessary to keep it online, and are thus more likely to do it. The moment you have to struggle with NPM dependencies to switch hosts, it’s all over. If all you have is a bit of html, no problem.
      • chippy 7y ago
        The article was about not having to maintain a site for non techies like us. WE can happily maintain a range of things, but a chemistry doctoral student will hit a hurdle and may give up. Paying for a server - mentioned in the article about the provider changing access. its all about hurdles.
    • ssivark 7y ago
      You might keep the content format mighty simple, but keep in mind that the hosting and delivery mechanism consisting of http/html are extremely demanding. In particular, your website's availability is fundamentally limited by the uptime of your host machine (which you are only leasing) and its HTTP server and network. If you forget to renew the lease on your host machine, or there is some mishap by the service provider, your website will vanish without a trace -- even if it happened to have a high rate of visitors.
• Thorentis 7y ago
  I find it an interesting social phenomenon that the finite nature of content on the Web is lamented, when content has been temporal for all of human history.
  • jtbayly 7y ago
    And a concern for a long time as well. Witness the Dead Sea scrolls, the many things literally carved into stone, etc.
  • makapuf 7y ago
    Carved stone is a bit more durable that that nice Myspace page was, however. Yes it was not widespread and was difficult to setup but millennia of duration is nice. I think that the medium, be it a hosting site or you own domain, will fail. What we need is maybe : a naming scheme that can transfer to different people (replicated files on different servers indexed by content hash? Aka anonymous ftp mirrors ... ) and common media ie readable by anyone, gracefully degrading.
• echelon 7y ago
  HMTL was a bad idea that just kept sprouting cancerous growths on top of itself. Just like the author recommends not using non-web fonts, we honestly don't need much markup beyond "monospace", "em", "strong", "title 1-5", and "p". Everything else HTML does is a huge distraction. In the past thirty years, there have only been a few actual kinds of content: - Article - Comment - Reference manual Nothing really deviates from this. If it does, then it's probably in the "application" domain and deserves all that javascript stuff. I imagine a new semantic web inspired content type that bakes in permanent content URLs, author signatures, and supports sharing P2P and rich archival: <article> <id> (Computed immutable content hash and signature. Subsequent revisions will invalidate this and require new content hashes. Links can be made to the old version.) </id> <authors> (metadata, homepage, public key) </authors> <contents> <title> Semantic Web was actually brilliant </title> <body> <h1>The Web was Embraced, Extended, and Extinguished</h1> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...</p> </body> </contents> </article> It can be a really simple model. No divs or presentational CSS or anything. (Well, maybe some support for LaTeX and I18N.) The client decides how it looks, which is how it always should have been. If every entity in the universe has an ID, they can link to each other in a distributed fashion. It won't matter if the original source URL goes down as long as someone somewhere has a cache. It's also probably better to binary encode these (protobuf or something). Images and media could be inlined instead of href'd. Instead of building on the layer cake, we should take a moment to reflect on what we're trying to do. We have a lot of history and bad evolution that we can garbage collect and streamline. If our objective is to publish and share content, a lightweight version of the semantic web is the way to go. Oh, and check out my follow-up to the author: <article> <id> (my own post's content hash) </id> <parent> (the author I'm responding to) </parent> <author> me </author> <contents> Hey you! I disagree! </contents> </article> Again, these can be distributed on a web. It can be p2p, federated, or live atop the classical WWW. It doesn't matter. The clients can richly use the semantic data model. The anger for disappearing content, walled gardens, and AMP will eventually reach a boil. As technologies go, the pendulum is always swinging. This is the direction we'll eventually head back to.
  • oneeyedpigeon 7y ago
• einpoklum 7y ago
  Make sure that archive.org - the Internet Archive - catches your website in "The Wayback Machine". Catering to that is a pretty good strategy for archiving for at least the next couple of decades, considering that institute's staying power. And on that note - consider donating to them.
  • 1f60c 7y ago
    The Internet Archive is a fantastic resource. And right now, they happen to match every donation two to one (so $5 becomes $5 + 2 * $5 = $15 dollars!)
    • kortilla 7y ago
      How do they match a donation to themselves?
      • trishmapow2 7y ago
        They currently have a deal with a donor who will donate $2 for every $1 the Archive gets in that time period.
        • bonoboTP 7y ago
          Just sign such a deal with two donors and boom, feedback loop, exponential growth, infinite money!!
• decasia 7y ago
  "I don't even know any web applications that have remained similarly functioning over 10 years" I have a WordPress instance that has functioned flawlessly since 2007. I would call WordPress a web application (though I realize this is not the bespoke sense of the term that the OP has in mind).
• xwowsersx 7y ago
  Maybe I'm dense, but I'm having trouble understanding what is so difficult about keeping content around. It seems like the issue of webpack and node and all the other things he mentions on the article aren't really problems with content per se. You can just publish your thoughts as a plain text file or markdown or whatever and you're good to go. I'm having a hard time thinking of types of content that are really tied to a specific presentation format which would require a complex scaffolding. A single static page with your thoughts is sufficient and should require no maintenance to keep around. I do agree though that even static site generators create workflows that get in the way. I'd love to see an extreeeemely minimal tool which lets you drop some files in a folder and then create an index page that links to those. You could argue that's what static site generators pretty much do, but they do seem to be more complex than that in practice. Remember deploying a web site with FTP? I have to say that was simpler for the average person than what we have today. I think that, in some ways, the complexity is what ends up pushing people towards FB, Medium, etc as publishing platforms.
  • SpaceManiac 7y ago
    It seems like in practice the biggest problem is "it got deleted", and everything else is about either preventing others from deleting your stuff or preventing yourself from deleting it out of laziness or frustration. Deploying a web site with (S)FTP works as well as it ever did... and is just as obscure to non-technical people as it ever was. Ease of use means loss of control.
    • xwowsersx 7y ago
      > Ease of use means loss of control. It'd be a cool challenge to build something so simple that even a non-tech person could use which allows them to maintain control and ownership. Any good examples of tech in general that is highly approachable like this? Even things like WordPress are too complicated for most - maybe if not self-hosted it's not so difficult, but still falls short in terms of being complex and not just simple text or html (at the most)..
  • sjy 7y ago
    > I'd love to see an extreeeemely minimal tool which lets you drop some files in a folder and then create an index page that links to those. Don’t most web servers do this already?
• dpcan 7y ago
  The only pages I ever go back to are the ones where I hope, or need, to find NEW content. Forums, stock art, reddit, hacker news, facebook, twitter, github (for updates). There is really only a small subset of Internet content that will ever need to stay the same - or even should stay the same. So, while slapping an HTML file on the web is great for, say, the synopsis of a movie, I think the majority of the web can be discarded when new and relevant content needs to take its place.
• fyp 7y ago
  I don't think there's any good solution to the dead link problem. For example there are 11 links in this article: https://jeffhuang.com/ https://gomakethings.com/the-web-is-not-dying/ https://archivebox.io/ https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/25315/hotlinking-what-is-it-and-why-shouldnt-people-do-it https://goaccess.io/ https://victorzhou.com/blog/minify-svgs/ https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/images-done-right-web-graphics-good-to-the-last-byte-optimization-techniques https://caniuse.com/#feat=webp https://uptimerobot.com/ http://www.pgbovine.net/python-tutor-ten-years.htm http://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/ How many of these will still be alive in 10 years? How many times do you have to fix your page to make your page "last"?
  • zbentley 7y ago
    Put a wayback machine link in parentheses/superscript after every link in the page?
    • T-hawk 7y ago
      Of course, you can't know how long the Wayback Machine itself will continue to exist, either.
      • Jenz 7y ago
        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.
      • tsukurimashou 7y ago
        and we don't know when it will be the end of the world so we should all stop breathing now
  • notatoad 7y ago
    I think the Stack Overflow guidelines have "solved" this problem in about the cleanest way currently possible: expect links to die, and include the relevant information in your answer. If the link still works when it gets clicked on that's a bonus, but it shouldn't need to be available for the content you're reading to be understandable.
• ageofwant 7y ago
  All my projects have a README.md, some a README.org. These are simple uncluttered formats which everyone with the most basic of readers can read. A few years back I fount my decades old masters thesis, written in plaintext latex. It compiled first time to pretty pdf on a raspberry pi. If you care about content, or anything really, keep it simple. https://plaintextproject.online/ https://plaintextproject.online/
• nyolfen 7y ago
  http://html.energy http://html.energy
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    Is this an exhortation to write raw HTML?
    • nyolfen 7y ago
      it's a celebration of writing html
• juststeve 7y ago
  XML tools should be able to validate the HTML locally, as these pages have already been "rendered" ahead of time. And it would be interesting to see some stats on the types of pages that are returned for the broken links. Are they returning HTTP 404s? 30x? 200's, or 500's? Does their site even allow for 300 redirection? But it makes sense to reduce infrastructure to serve static content, which are all points of failure anyway, or at least a maintenance burden.
  • tannhaeuser 7y ago
    Not XML but SGML [1], the superset and origin of both XML and HTML. [1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html5.html http://sgmljs.net/docs/html5.html
• DonHopkins 7y ago
  "Last First Page Design"
• tomtomtom777 7y ago
  The problem is clear but the solutions presented don't seem to help all that much. This is why I hope for a future with content-based addressing, as used in bittorrent and IPFS. Bittorrent has its focus set on files, and IPFS is becoming a bit convoluted but the core idea is very powerful. Immutable content persists by "pinning". And even if the author no longer wants to maintain the resource, there are likely some "users" that will (eg. linked pages). And even if there is little interest from users there are still archiving services that might want to keep it. Persistent unless it's so vile or irrelevant that even archiving services ditch it. All addressable by the same content hash.
• zZorgz 7y ago
  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.
  • superkuh 7y ago
    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.
    • saagarjha 7y ago
      Not really. With a little bit of effort, it’s quite possible to make websites that work on mobile devices as well a desktops.
• matt_morgan 7y ago
  Everything old is new again.
• luxuryballs 7y ago
  This is also why if you ever want to make a platform or service that will rely on permanent links make sure you consider making configurable/trackable routing as part of a resource’s stored data record, not just whatever your application decides at the time. That way when you inevitably want to upgrade the system and change the routing you can always maintain the old ones because they aren’t purely defined by application implementation. This is the difference between crafting software to do something and crafting software to build something that manages the thing you want to do.
• 6510 7y ago
  I have to compliment Jeff for first telling me unpopular things I already believe then adding sensible things to it (except the link back to his page) The idea ForEach person to write just one single web page is really wonderful. I'm going to have to deeply ponder that and make one. While I really like the permanent web and losing centralized control over data is a price worth paying (.... no wait, I would pay money not to have this.) the winning method of making cars last 100 years is maintenance not build quality. That said, here are some similar ideas of mine: I often add a torrent magnet uri when I link to youtube. I seed those torrents myself and sometimes someone helps. If the content was good enough and yt deletes it for whatever [stooopid] reason there would be more seeds. Here http://dr-lexus.go-here.nl http://dr-lexus.go-here.nl I, in stead, try to "sell" the idea that [besides from stuff breaking] people use and will use a combination of Adblock Plus, NoScript, RequestPolicy, Ghostery and JSOff to break your stuff. You can put a really tiny bit of css inline and at least render the page properly if the css fails for whatever reason. I really dislike how our websites merely provide just one location for everything so I wrote this: <img src="http://example.com/img.jpg" data-x="0" onerror="a=[ 'http://example.com/img.jpg', 'http:/example.com/img2.jpg', 'http://img.go-here.nl/michael-faraday.jpg' ]; this.src=a[this.dataset.x++]" > The page has an example failing back to data-uri which imho looks surprisingly decent for its size. Its way better than having a hole in the page.
  • ShamelessC 7y ago
    Hm I really like the idea of using torrent as a Fail-Safe for media. How do you go about generating a magnet link for your videos?
    • genuinebyte 7y ago
      I'd like to chime in here and suggest you have a look at PeerTube. https://joinpeertube.org/en/ https://joinpeertube.org/en/ I haven't tried it yet but it uses the BitTorrent protocol for video retrieval, so there is your magnet link? Of course it is self-hosted if you can't find an instance that'll take you, but it might be a good option.
• keithnz 7y ago
  bit disappointed, mainly because I was expecting something a bit different. I was hoping to see something that has some ideas that would make things last beyond the original author, say for 100 years. Of course that's hard to predict given tech will change, but what the best guess effort to make your page last as long as it possibly can into the future You need to address the problem of domain names...the author has a vanity domain name that needs to be paid for that will need to continue to be paid for, so may need to pigggyback onto another domain Hosting might be tricky My best guess is MAYBE something like Github would solve both issues....
  • susam 7y ago
    > the author has a vanity domain name that needs to be paid for that will need to continue to be paid for, so may need to pigggyback onto another domain This is a very good point. I host my blog with a vanity domain name[1]. The domain name was accidentally taken away from me[2] for a while due to which my blog became unreachable. As a result of this experience, I now host a mirror of my blog using GitHub Pages[3]. Further, I have made sure that the entire blog can be downloaded[4] to local filesystem and viewed locally, i.e., all inter-linking is done using relative paths only. [1]: https://susam.in https://susam.in [2]: https://susam.in/blog/sinkholed/ https://susam.in/blog/sinkholed/ [3]: https://susam.github.io/ https://susam.github.io/ [4]: https://github.com/susam/susam.github.io/archive/master.zip https://github.com/susam/susam.github.io/archive/master.zip
• juststeve 7y ago
  Well, a new HTTP status code or header could be created for sites that are closing, then if a browser navigates to the website, it could prompt the user for action? e.g. update bookmark, archive, or email site admin (if on the hosting side).
  • kortilla 7y ago
    Most sites close quite abruptly (domain didn’t renew, web server crashed, site was “modernized”, etc). Most link rot is due to the fact that people aren’t actively trying to keep things alive. An HTTP code won’t help with that.
• nayuki 7y ago
  Jeff's article has similar sentiments and technical recommendations as Tim Berners-Lee's classic piece "Cool URIs don't change" (1998): https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• whack 7y ago
  Let's be honest with ourselves. The best way to make your content last for a long time is to host it on a platform that is free and very successful. For example, whatever photos I posted on Facebook 12 years ago? Still alive and kicking. The articles I've published on wordpress.com 7 years ago? Still in mint condition, with 0 maintenance required. In comparison, the websites that I've built and hosted or deployed myself, have constantly required periodic work just to "keep the lights on". I went out of my way to make this as minimal and cheap as possible, but even then, it hasn't been nearly as simple as the content I've published on wordpress. At some point, people's priorities change. Perhaps due to new additions to the family, medical circumstances, or even prolonged unemployment. And when that happens, even the smallest amount of upkeep, whether it is financial, technical or simply logistical, becomes something they have no interest in engaging with. If we really want our content to last, not just for 10 years but for a generation, our best bet is to publish it on a platform like wordpress.com. One which requires literally zero maintenance, and where all tech infrastructure is completely abstracted away from you. I know this isn't going to be a popular idea with the HN crowd, and I do not blame anyone at all for wanting to keep control over their content. People are free to optimize along whatever dimensions they wish. But if I had to bet on longevity, I would bet every time on the wordpress article over the self-hosted one.
  • winfred 7y ago
    >Let's be honest with ourselves. The best way to make your content last for a long time is to host it on a platform that is free and very successful. For example, whatever photos I posted on Facebook 12 years ago? Still alive and kicking. The articles I've published on wordpress.com 7 years ago? Still in mint condition, with 0 maintenance required. You view on timeline is too short. We're not talking about keeping something online for 7 years, but for 70. If I had followed your advice a few years ago, I would have deployed on Geocities. Do you know what happened to those websites? The question is, is wordpress going to be around in 70 years? No one knows. But that static HTML page will still render fine, even if it is running in a backward compatibility mode on your neurolink interface.
    • marc_io 7y ago
• Loranubi 7y ago
  I am all for archiving important web content, but imo most of the web content is not important and impossible to archive anyway. Too many pages use dynamic content which make web archives useless. Also having too much data just dilutes the useful stuff. If you have useful content (the author should) store it in some other way. Put articles in any simple markup format like markdown in git, distribute videos using torrent and so on. For some types of content I couldn't think of a good solution yet. For examples JS games or applications should be in some self-contained single-file "web-executable" format. Images need to be embedded often, so torrent is not a good medium, but they don't belong in git also. So not really sure where to put them... Also make sure to use standardized formats with proper structure. Browsers should remove quirk modes and flat out refuse to render anything which cannot be interpreted 100% unambiguously. Webpages are always just a temporary distribution medium. They should never be the original storage place. Sorry if all of that sounded a little bit rant-y, but I think the current web is a very bad state.
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    > Browsers should remove quirk modes and flat out refuse to render anything which cannot be interpreted 100% unambiguously. Unfortunately the web seems to have de-facto standardized on these quirks and large swaths of the internet would break if you removed them.
  • inimino 7y ago
    There are still orders of magnitude more pages of HTML than Markdown, so if you're interested in archival, just store simple HTML. I'd say HTML has a good chance of being interpretable a thousand years from now.
• lmm 7y ago
  HTML is a terrible authoring format. CSS is a terrible everything. If you want something to last, the thing that will last is the human-created source - probably markdown. I'm not worried about my blog posts sitting in their git repository being lost. The Jekyll pipeline that adds a Javascript header/footer might go away, as might the Javascript that pretifies my raw posts, but the markdown is durable, and a future archivist could always regenerate a pretty version from the markdown - or even read the raw markdown. Give browsers a good way to view markdown, give site creators a good way to link to canonical source for their pages, and then we'll have durable links.
  • chrismorgan 7y ago
    No, I trust HTML and CSS to stand the test of time far more than Markdown. Do you know how many different variants of Markdown there are, how they affect the interpretation and appearance of the content, how they can break surprisingly much? And when it comes down to it, as soon as you want to do anything even remotely interesting in Markdown, you have to drop straight HTML in there, and pray that the Markdown engine will do the right thing, since the rules of how it should all work are insanely complex, and vary widely by engine, for all that there’s a general trend towards CommonMark which at least specifies the madness and folly. (I’m sad that Markdown won over reStructuredText, which was actually designed.) HTML is a quite acceptable authoring format, one that readily lets you do interesting things if you desire—though making it possible can certainly be a footgun. CSS is a reasonable styling language.
    • lmm 7y ago
      > Do you know how many different variants of Markdown there are, how they affect the interpretation and appearance of the content, how they can break surprisingly much? One plus a bunch of non-standard extensions. Do you know how many different variants of HTML there are, how rare it is for real-world HTML to actually conform to any of them, and how many different interpretations of that there are. (To say nothing of CSS, the standard so complex that it's never actually been implemented). > And when it comes down to it, as soon as you want to do anything even remotely interesting in Markdown, you have to drop straight HTML in there Just say no. If your goal is writing something intended to last, you should be able to convey it in mostly-plain text.
• metapsj 7y ago
  here's another option to throw into the mix... ward cunningham's federated wiki https://wardcunningham.github.io/ https://wardcunningham.github.io/
• tgbugs 7y ago
  The issues outlined here are one of the reasons that I am moving as many of my workflows to org-mode as possible. Everything is text. Any fancy bits that you need can also be text, and then you tangle and publish to whatever fancy viewing tool comes along in the future. I don't have a workflow for scraping and archiving snapshots of external links, but if someone hasn't already developed one for org I would be very surprised. In another context I suggested to the hypothes.is team that they should automatically submit any annotated web page to the internet archive, so that there would always be a snapshot of the content that was annotated, not sure whether that came to fruition. In yet another context I help maintain a persistent identifier system, and let me tell you, my hatred for the URI spec for its fundamental failure to function as a time invariant identifier system is hard to describe in a brief amount of time. The problem is particularly acute for scholarly work, where under absolutely no circumstances should people be using URIs or URLs to reference anything on the web at all. There must be some institution that maintains something like the URN layer. We aren't there yet, but maybe we are moving quickly enough that only one generation worth of work will vanish into the mists.
  • Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    > The issues outlined here are one of the reasons that I am moving as many of my workflows to org-mode as possible. Everything is text. That works for some, even most people. Unfortunately, the content I create will inevitably cite material in languages other than the main document language. That means that I have to heavily use HTML span lang="XX" tags to set the right language for those passages, so that (among other things) users with screenreaders will get the right output. As far as I know, org-mode lacks the ability to semantically mark up text in this way.
    • tgbugs 7y ago
      If it is for blocks of text then you could use #+BEGIN_VERSE in combination with #+ATTR_HTML, or possibly create a custom #+BEGIN_FRENCH block type, but I suspect that you are thinking about inline markup, in which case you have two options, one is to write a macro {{{lang(french,ju ne parle frances}}} and the other would be to hack the export-snippet functionality so you could write @@french:ju ne parle frances@@ and have it do the right thing when exporting to html. The macro is certainly easier, and if you know in advance what languages you need it shortens to {{{fr:ju ne parle frances}}} which is reasonably economical in terms of typing.
• incompatible 7y ago
  The number of potential re-hosters is increased by releasing everything with a free license. Some won't violate copyright laws, e.g., Wikimedia Commons for individual media files.
• jerezzprime 7y ago
  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?
  • ljosa 7y ago
    TFA is written from a reader's perspective: the author had found a bunch of links important enough to bookmark, and then most of them disappeared.
  • rtkwe 7y ago
    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.
  • cambalache 7y ago
    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
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    The things I’d put in a personal journal are certainly not what I put online.
• simonsarris 7y ago
  Good rules, I follow all of them, making a pure HTML/CSS single page homepage of uncompressed HTML, except... it's not at all designed to last. I nuked my last site to make it, and I'll nuke this one one day when I wanna make something even cooler. Website as art installation plus a few links. My content is spread about, on medium, on github, twitter, instagram, wherever. But this too I feel is mostly ephemeral. It's still not clear to me why that's a bad thing. I dislike hoarding physical objects. I'm not sure about digital, either, I suppose. So one alternative is to free yourself from the idea that it needs to be hoarded, that all your works need to be maximally legible and easy to find, etc. I do suppose if you're a professor your students should probably be able to find the syllabus from your website (which he has, though it's hosted on brown's site).
  • JasonFruit 7y ago
    > It's still not clear to me why that's a bad thing. Human advancement comes from the process of building knowledge on knowledge, using what our predecessors learned to move our starting point forward. (You're the predecessor in that sentence.)
• cellularmitosis 7y ago
  I feel like philip greenspun deserves a mention as one of the OG's in this practice. https://philip.greenspun.com/sql/trees.html https://philip.greenspun.com/sql/trees.html
• panic 7y ago
  To last a long time, you need a lot of people hosting copies. Think about PDFs -- it's easy to host a local copy of a PDF, so popular PDFs tend to be widely available. But a site hosting a local copy of every webpage it links to would feel weird.
• nichochar 7y ago
  Wonderful write-up. In particular, I appreciated how actionable this was. As a backend developer that loves the web but isn't part of the whole frontend mania, I completely relate, yet still learned a couple things that I can apply easily.
• rodw 7y ago
  I think this article is excellent, but one small nit: isn't it contradictory to say don't minimize HTML but do minimize SVG? The justification in the HTML case is that "view source is good" and "it's compressed over the wire anyway". Don't those arguments apply equally (or nearly equally) well to SVG?
  • iwalton3 7y ago
    Programs such as Inkscape put a lot of extra information into SVG files that is not actually needed for them to render. File size reductions with SVG minifiers can be significant. For instance, the applications-internet.svg icon goes from 31K to 9K when compressing it with svgo.
  • setr 7y ago
    I've never looked into svg specifically but I would assume that even if it's xml, it's generally far from reasonably human readable/editable, in which case you're not losing the properties by minimizing. Unreadable -> more unreadable is much less significant than readable -> unreadable
    • rodw 7y ago
      That's why I hedged a bit. SVG is certainly less readable, but it can be human readable if not aggressively minimized. I've both created and modified SVG documents by hand with a text editor, and also view-sourced SVGs to see how they work. The only thing that is especially unreadable are the long strings of coordinates that make up paths, and even those can be manageable with comments. No one does complex paths by hand, but the rest is colors, shapes, transforms -- all things you can read and may want to modify.
    • sjogress 7y ago
      SVGs are human readable and human writable. I used SVG as a templating/markup language for years. We were writing software for a specialized, embedded, browser that only understood JS and SVG. It only took a few days of acclimatization to move from writing HTML to writing SVG.
  • 7y ago
• hoten 7y ago
  The point on not minimizing HTML doesn't make any sense to me. Who looks at HTML via View Source to understand a site, when the Elements panel is right there?
  • r3drock 7y ago
    I think it has a value for technically less literate people.
• tyzerdak 7y ago
  I don't get about Prefer one page over several. Anyway some points seems reasonable but I bet most people will use wordpress and when they are not interested they will abandon it and it's gone. Imo better force web archive to make more archives and donate it or smth.
• vikeri 7y ago
  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.
• maple3142 7y ago
  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.
• Animats 7y ago
  I have pages on my web site that are 24 years old. Here's one.[1] [1] http://animats.com/papers/articulated/articulated.html http://animats.com/papers/articulated/articulated.html
  • xwowsersx 7y ago
    Beautiful!
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    Older than many Hacker News readers!
• peter_retief 7y ago
  Web development is way too complex.
• lurenjia 7y ago
  While in China, contents online are expected to disappear any minute and screenshot is the first choice to save & share.
• Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
  >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?
  • kristopolous 7y ago
    It's changed a bit, fairly fundamentally (hiding points, web view, collapsible conversations, ...) . The chan sites haven't, they're probably the closest interactive ones. Metafilter also hasn't but it's pretty small
    • jacquesm 7y ago
      > Metafilter also hasn't but it's pretty small That is why it is still around. Things that grow eventually grow out of control and then people will move on.
• hsivonen 7y ago
  For preservation, using self-hosted fonts is better than trusting the “Web-safe” fonts being available on the client (already not true e.g. on Android).
• turkeydonkey 7y ago
  I'm disappointed that it's not served up by the one true http server for static sites, https://acme.com/software/thttpd/ https://acme.com/software/thttpd/
• markvdb 7y ago
  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...
• tannhaeuser 7y ago
  I'd like to point out SGML as a format for very long document storage and sustainable authoring. I've written up a tutorial for using SGML for preserving content [1] that I held at this year's ACM DocEng conference. [1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/sgml-html-tutorial.html http://sgmljs.net/docs/sgml-html-tutorial.html
• dirktheman 7y ago
  This is somewhat of a concern to me: I can imagine a distant future where one of the great mysteries would be the rise and fall of literacy, since almost no written communication is left and computers and the internet are long forgotten, obsolete technology. "In the beginning of the 21st century people suddenly stopped reading and writing. In the short timespan of only a few decades almost all form of written communication has vanished..."
  • perlgeek 7y ago
    Even if you count only printed books, the number of books published by year is still rising in the US: https://www.theifod.com/how-many-new-books-are-published-each-year-and-other-related-books-facts/ https://www.theifod.com/how-many-new-books-are-published-eac... It seems that the time spent reading decreases slightly.
• imhoguy 7y ago
  We need a common distributed storage protocol - kind of Bit Torrent for web pages. Dead simple in use and built into (every) browser transparently. Anytime a public page is visited/bookmarked then it is preserved in a swarm of caches until the last seeder dies.
  • sergimansilla 7y ago
    Sounds exactly like what the Dat protocol and the Beaker Browser https://www.beakerbrowser.com/ https://www.beakerbrowser.com/ offer.
  • feanaro 7y ago
    IPFS aims to be this, but it's still not working well enough.
• bad_user 7y ago
  I completely agree with this article, however ... > (4) End all forms of hotlinking Any advice on what to do if you want to embed videos? Bandwidth can cost a lot (maybe I'm wrong?) and AFAIK Cloudflare doesn't cache videos. I would stick with Vimeo, but they can delete your videos if over threshold after you stop paying. YouTube at this point is sadly a better bet if you want to maintain a low cost website for decades. Any alternatives I'm missing?
  • Double_a_92 7y ago
    If bandwidth (and not storage) is the only issue, you could upload it on youtube but still add a direct link to your self-hosted file.
• PaulRobinson 7y ago
  A shift to independent publishing is needed. I used to have sites that died because the upkeep became tiresome, and if - a professional developer with almost 25 years experience of writing web applications - find it tiresome, can we blame people for wanting to use the big platforms? I think using a static site generator might be OK. Common headers and footers help, and RSS might definitely be a good thing, but that seems to be dying. One idea from this article I liked was "one page, over many". I don't think he meant have one single page on your website, but rather one per directory, and like he has with this article have one directory for a thought or essay or piece of something you want documenting, and just have an index.html in it. I like this because I think the one thing that has killed off most personal websites is not the tech tool chain, but that "blogging" created an expectation of everybody becoming a constant content creator. The pressure to create content and for it to potentially "go viral" is one of several reasons I just tore down several sites over the years. Around this time of year I take a break from work and think about my various side projects, and sometimes think about "starting a blog again". I often spend a few hours fiddling with Jekyll or Hugo, both good tools. Then I sit and think about the relentless pressure to add content to this "thing". I like this idea instead though. No blogs. No constant "hot takes" or pressure to produce content all the time. Just build a slowly growing, curated, hand-rolled website. I still think there might be a utility in having a static site build flow with a template function, but a simple enough design could be updated with nothing more than CSS. Bit to think about, here... interesting.
  • lunchables 7y ago
    I use a combination of asciidoc and hugo to generate my static website. It means that I can easily regenerate the website using whatever tool I want in the future or even just easily update the template for the existing site. If something happens to asciidoc, there are lots of converters that would allow me to move to another format or presumably some format in the future. Markdown and restructuretext are also really good options.
• pergadad 7y ago
  Does Google Web Fonts not do some tracking along the lines of analytics? I'd never integrate a Google service in my site and sell user info out for little/no benefit.
  • stkdump 7y ago
    Yeah, he does recommemd to host the fonts yourself. I guess that renders the point that the users already have them cached moot...?
• sergimansilla 7y ago
  It sounds like the perfect case for the Beaker browser (https://www.beakerbrowser.com https://www.beakerbrowser.com), which is backed solidly by the Dat protocol.
  • chippy 7y ago
    an experimental browser is to be considered something which will last a long time? Or would it need lots of maintenance? I can predict that in the next 5 years there will be some api change and users will have to migrate. And some users will not. If users will be dropped then it is not a perfect thing that makes pages last. Yes it probably is great to get started for newbies, but the article was about things that last
    • sergimansilla 7y ago
      Doesn’t seem like you know what you’re talking about. API changes? Sure, if you’re referring to the HTML language changing. The content does not depend on the browser being there. It’s just “dat” addresses. Dat is a public p2p protocol with good success stories, especially in the scientific community.
• thadk 7y ago
  Some of the classic articles from the Kuro5hin website mentioned are available at https://web.archive.org/web/20061124151022/http://ko4ting.maddash.org/cgi-bin/k4/Classic_Stories https://web.archive.org/web/20061124151022/http://ko4ting.ma... If you need any particular ones not available on http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/ http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/ let me know here and I can pull them out of an old archive for 2000-2007.
  • devurand 7y ago
    Good ol' localroger. I never knew I wanted to read singularity fiction that included zombie rape and forced incest until Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Int... http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html
• atoav 7y ago
  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 in some cellar and they could make a new working copy from whatever they found. With digital technology this became much much harder and costly for them, because it often means cobbling together the last working tape players and maintaining both the machines and the knowledge of how to maintain them. With stuff on harddrives a hundred different codecs that won’t run on just any machine etc this combined to something she called the digital gap. I had never thought about technology in that way. Nowadays this kind of robustness, archiveability and futureproofing has become a factor that drives many of my decisions when it comes to file formats, software etc. This is one of the main reasons why I dislike relying soly on cloud based solutions for many applications. What if that fancy startup goes south? What happens to my data? Even if they allow me to get it in a readable format, couldn’t I just have avoided that by using something reliable from the start? I grew to both understand and like the unix mantra of small independent units of organizations — trying as hard as possible not to make software and other things into a interlinked ball of mud that falls apart once of the parts stops working for one or the other reasons. Thinking about how your notes, texts, videos, pictures, software, tools etc. will look in a quasi post apocalyptic scenario can be a healthy exercise.
  • blackoil 7y ago
    Ask Whovians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes). Post internet, most content is globally replicated. Someone somewhere will find time and energy to make an Amiga simulator with exactly correct bugs, to run the program you want. Amount of content lost proportion to amount of content created must have gone down dramatically.
    • Twisell 7y ago
      Sorry for cross interfering with this post timeline ;)
• BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  The 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-shortcuts https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-keyboard-sh... My favorite is "?", which is not documented in this link. It forces search instead of resolving a domain name. E.G: if I type "path.py", looking for the python lib with this name, Firefox will try to go to http://path.py http://path.py, and will show me an error. I can just add " ?" at the end (with the space) and it will happily search. It's a fantastic feature I wish more people knew about. It very well done as well, as you can use it without moving your hands from the keyboard: Ctrl + l gets you to the URL bar, but Ctrl + k gets you to the URL bar, clears it, insert "? ", then let you type :) It's my latest FF illumination, the previous one was discovering that Ctrl + Shirt + t was reopening the last closed tab.
  • abrolhos 7y ago
    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.
    • chrismorgan 7y ago
      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.
• Mojah 7y ago
  Re: "Eliminate the broken URL risk" This approach of monitoring a single URL is useful, especially if you can use the free version of monitoring services. It doesn't, however, go far enough. Does your site only consist of a single page? Are there no links between pages? Or links to external resources? There are few things as off-putting to your visitor by presenting them a link that ends in a 404 page. Forgive the shameless plug, but this is the exact reason we built the Oh Dear [1] tool. We crawl the site, much like Google, to find those pages and present them to you so you can fix them. It's not that expensive and it covers your _entire_ site, not just a single page that is designed to last. I hope your _entire_ site is designed to last, we like to help make that happen. [1] https://ohdear.app/ https://ohdear.app/
• gdgtfiend 7y ago
  > *from my high school years, where I first tasted the god-like feeling of dominance over software* This piece of writing killed the rest of this article for me. While his point is worth making, the way he went about making it just sounds very childish. Especially for a Professor.
• mmsimanga 7y ago
  > But if not, maybe you are an embedded systems programmer or startup CTO or enterprise Java developer or chemistry PhD student, sure you could probably figure out how to set up some web server and toolchain, but will you keep this up year after year, decade after decade? This describes me. Started on Drupal now on Hugo but still have to retrain myself everytime I need to update my site. I don't even understand my own Hugo template. I once set up batch file to build and upload web site. I upgraded computer and I couldn't get my batch file to work. It was something on my PC or AWS. Most likely my incompetence and lack of time to find issue. I am going back to HTML and FTP. Funny thing is I learnt HTML in college and 20 years later I can jump into it without much fuss.
• punnerud 7y ago
  Archive.org also support adding custom pages to be saved. Is miss a feature on the WeyBack Machine chrome extension to automatically check every bookmark, and auto save if it is not already saved: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-machine/fpnmgdkabkmnadcjpehmlllkndpkmiak https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-machine/fp...
• choicenotchance 7y ago
  Seems like an ad for Heroku and Wiix.
• scotty79 7y ago
  All 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.
• Tepix 7y ago
  I 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.
  • chispamed 7y ago
    I disagree, image compression is still highly relevant and will stay relevant for a long time. It’s not about hosting costs and hosting bandwidth, it’s about user bandwidth. I frequently travel between countries by train and bus and when outside cities it’s almost impossible to get any non-optimized page to load. And this doesn’t even only extend to the time spent inside the train. Depending on the country (all developed) and which phone operator my phone decides to switch to, I have slow mobile internet about half of the time. This is also one of the reasons why I prefer to read HN over other sites: HN loads, others don’t. Most images on a modern website don’t really contribute anything substantial but are merely decorative. Image quality loss should therefore not be a problem for ~90% of images.
    • Tepix 7y ago
      Compare the available mobile bandwidth and cost today with what we had just 5 years ago. We're talking about regular web pages here. Sure, you don't want to put full resolution images straight into your page. That makes no sense. But if you have a regular page with a couple of images, its size up to a certain size won't matter in most places in a few more years, just as it doesn't matter today if you live in a more densely populated area. I have a mobile phone contract where I get 10GB of traffic (which seems a lot to me but which is laughable if you compare it to other markets such as Kuwait where contracts with 1TB/month are normal) for less than 20€ per month and I only manage to use 3GB per month or so most of the time.
• franze 7y ago
  I wanted to make a pre MVP leads landing page this week. Researched new static site builder and templates. Choose one, ran into a build problem, then saw that docs were not up to date... all in all half a day with no hard, ready to launch outcome. Took a step back, what is the most minimal thing I needed. Took html5 boilerplate, copy&pasted the index.html, put normalize.css inline. Got rid of everything else. Minimal Html, an image, form mailer. Done and launched https://www.securrr.app https://www.securrr.app on Netlify in less than an hour. Overengineering is real. Choose a goal, use the most simplest solution to get there.
• Brendinooo 7y ago
  This is nice, but that webfont bullet is a weird take. If you're hosting the font yourself and you're using a modern format, fonts don't add a lot of overhead, and if they happen to fail then the browser will take the next item down the stack. It's textbook progressive enhancement. Nothing about adding a webfont properly will prevent Web content from lasting and being maintained for 10 years. "your focus should be about delivering the content to the user effectively and making the choice of font to be invisible, rather than stroking your design ego" - these aren't the only two options?
  • 6510 7y ago
    haha right, the font is the only thing that has proper fallback and always works.
  • Pigo 7y ago
    This definitely reads like something one of my professors would have written. Someone with a lot of good knowledge, but lacking some context for things you learn in the field.
• joshspankit 7y ago
  I would actually shift this quite a bit to say if you’re designing your page to last 10 years, put it on the internet archive on day 1. Invite them to crawl it, verify the crawl was successful, and even talk about that link on your page. It removes the risk of domain hijacking, hosting platforms shuttering, and the author losing interest. P.s. The internet archive is doing excellent work. Support them.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
    Great idea!
  • majewsky 7y ago
    And as you give a content donation, please also consider a monetary donation to keep the lights on at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/
    • sudo_rm 7y ago
      I started a recurring donation through your link. Thanks for posting this.
• ynniv 7y ago
  Don't throw away those bookmarks! Even if they don't work by default, they're still links to valuable content in the WayBack Machine!
• ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
  One thing that I do, and it does get me a few sneers, is I tend to eschew the use of a lot of fancy "eye candy." I invest in fairly basic CSS, and tend to avoid using JS for any site-required functionality (unless it's a JS site). I have found my sites age well. There's a couple that I've barely changed in a decade.
• Pigo 7y ago
  > We can avoid jquery and bootstrap Amen to that at least. Nothing bums me out more than someone using jquery just for a simple DOM selection, or having a simple layout and using bootstrap just because you know their columns.
  • epicide 7y ago
    For those that just want to do DOM selection, querySelector(All) is widely supported at this point. If you want a simple CSS framework (because you don't want to write CSS) that includes a grid system, Milligram is a useful alternative.
    • Pigo 7y ago
      I haven't seen Milligram yet, I'll check that out. I've seen people include the full jquery just to select something by ID. But I guess it's hardly my worst horror story.
• Olshansky 7y ago
  I feel like this problem can be solved by pocket's (getpocket.com) premium service where they store and index articles you've read and archived.
• tripzilch 7y ago
  > I think we've reached the point where html/css is more powerful, and nicer to use than ever before. Instead of starting with a giant template filled with .js includes, it's now okay to just write plain HTML from scratch again. This is so true, I do it for all my personal webpages. Well I currently have Github Pages in between, but markdown converts to pretty neat vanilla HTML and I wrote the templates myself. On another note, to his third point, I couldn't access index.20191213.html :)
• jrjrjrjr 7y ago
  Maff, Mht, it's the best way I found to save snapshots of websites. if you want to save an entire site, there's PDF. I keep them yearly in sub directories marked by year, it's pretty convienient and you can rename each Maff to be most relevant to a directory view, special pages go below the year directory. currently only waterfox still has this option, since the snooty mozilla guys can't bring themselves to carry on a 15 year WORKING method that wasn't Not Invented Here...
  • jrjrjrjr 7y ago
    >> just saved my comment in 10 seconds, on the desktop for later filing if it is deemed worthy. someone needs to bring this feature back. waterfox is only 64 bit, i wish it could be a replacement for the rotting mozilla firefoxes that I can't upgrade..... jr
• el_cujo 7y ago
  I like the general principle here of trying to keep website design relatively simple and self-reliant, but I'm not sure I agree with the idea that "link rot" is some horrible problem we desperately need a solution for. Good articles will be lost in time, but I think that's OK. New good ones will be written too. It's OK for content to be ephemeral, we don't have to be so obsessed with FOMO and making sure every blogpost ever made is etched into diamond to survive for 100 generations. If you read some article you thought was great, it's OK to just be happy you read it rather than spamming it to the four corners of the earth to give it as many eyes as possible.
• artur_makly 7y ago
  Right after we launched, we were pleasantly surprised that a good portion of our users started using our automated visual site-mapping platform [1] to archive their sites ( while redesigning newer versions of them ) and other public sites of interest. [1] https://VisualSitemaps.com https://VisualSitemaps.com
• miguelmota 7y ago
  Is there a browser extension that can automatically add a site that you bookmark to the Wayback Machine and fetch the bookmarked site from the Wayback Machine if it 404's? I really hate it when I bookmark something and come back to it months or years later to find that the page doesn't exist any more so having something to automatically pull it from the web archive would be amazing
• neilobremski 7y ago
  These points look like the old (timeless) guidelines I remember for creating a web page ... solid, good, and as plain as a saltine cracker. I love it and it stores well but convincing the world while we romp through the hype of technological progress is like following a mob through the streets telling them to pick up their garbage.
• akouri 7y ago
  I love this! I was going to write something similar. The increasing prevalence of sites that shard their content over multiple pages to increase ad impressions seems beneficial to nobody; the consumer, producer, and advertiser all have degraded experiences. The problem is that the companies which are paying out for ads (Google) don't penalize this type of behavior, so it is financially beneficial to have super bloated websites which require 15 page refreshes to view all the content. wikihow is a very good antipattern to follow. This site should be deindexed from google entirely.
• boycaught 7y ago
  The HTML/CSS suggestion is key. "KISS"
• seinecle 7y ago
  What would be a lasting server to host this lasting page?
• LukeWarmPiss 7y ago
  test comment
• BrandoElFollito 7y ago
  Infinite scroll is an abomination and requires the JS the author wants to get rid of. I prefer a page which loads completely and which I can search (directly or via Google)
• chrisMyzel 7y ago
  Using wallabag (o.s. Pocket like alternative) for bookmarks and it saves a copy of the website in a screenreader mode fashion so text and images - so far I have around 2k links in there and it takes no significant size so far
• edisonjoao 7y ago
  i love this