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I think the concept of the WWW as a vast library of accumulating knowledge was a nice vision but it was never a reality, and even less so today. Every time some
by acabal 5y ago
I think the concept of the WWW as a vast library of accumulating knowledge was a nice vision but it was never a reality, and even less so today. Every time someone stops paying a server bill, a part of that vast library disappears forever. URLs change all the time without redirects, closing doors in the library, usually for good. Protocols go out of fashion (Gopher anybody? FTP?). That's why we have important services like the Wayback Machine and archive.org, which are probably the real vast libraries of accumulating knowledge.
- kragen 5y agoIt's true that there are many existing causes for the decay of the web, and we should work to fix those. But that becomes more and more difficult when we add more and more causes to the decay. That's not two important services you've named, but only one, and at some point it will be destroyed; it's only temporary. Hopefully it will last a few decades. Brewster Kahle, the founder of archive.org, has a saying: Governments burn libraries.
- classichasclass 5y agoWayback is probably not a good example here, though, because it backs up neither (to use your examples) Gopher nor FTP. There are some images of such sites on the Internet Archive, but these are site dumps people have taken steps to manually upload. I submit that won't be the majority.
- kragen 5y agoThe Wayback Machine doesn't have very good coverage of FTP, but it's not literally zero: https://web.archive.org/web/2002*/ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/distributions/redhat https://web.archive.org/web/2002*/ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/...