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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 cont
by 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 agoThere 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.