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The paid, legal-oriented, archiving service Perma.cc that Harvard Law runs actually lets you upload your own PDFs and screenshots in addition to allowing Perma.

The paid, legal-oriented, archiving service Perma.cc that Harvard Law runs actually lets you upload your own PDFs and screenshots in addition to allowing Perma.cc's bots capture webpages. Of course, since you could upload anything the difference is made clear in the UI. In a legal context, simply attesting to the validity of a screenshot is really common. So when that functionality is used Perma.cc is operating more as a permanent file storage service than a trusted archive. Regardless, this does go a long way to solving the problem of dynamic sites.

cxr 5y ago
> actually lets you upload your own PDFs and screenshots in addition to allowing Perma.cc's bots capture webpages FWIW: the Wayback Machine is just one part of the Internet Archive. The quoted bit accurately describes things you can do with an archive.org account, too. Readers here may be familiar with the archive.org-affiliated effort by a team specifically working to recreate the playability of old PC (and otherwise) video games with JSMESS. > this does go a long way to solving the problem of dynamic sites Maybe, but the "dynamic" aspect that I'm sure the other person had in mind doesn't have much to do with the D in DHTML so much as it has to do with the dynamism that arises when you have a smart server responding to requests from a fat, JS-powered frontend. It would be possible to accurately model this in and execute it from a series of static assets, in some cases, but it's rarely done. Even many sites built with static site generators today are not going to be usable in the future. There's too much tight coupling to the environment/deployment configuration and not enough semantic richness to properly hint to the crawler what resources are necessary to archive. In the heydey of XML, it used to be a big deal to strive for machine readable documents. Today's resume-driven development-obsessed webdevs effectively cast a vote of no confidence even in HTML, doing an end-run around it daily, and figuratively holding up a middle finger to the Principle of Least Power. https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html#PLP https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html#PLP To some extent, even a bunch of the projects associated with TBL's Solid initiative are guilty of doing the same.

cxr 5y ago

> actually lets you upload your own PDFs and screenshots in addition to allowing Perma.cc's bots capture webpages FWIW: the Wayback Machine is just one part of the Internet Archive. The quoted bit accurately describes things you can do with an archive.org account, too. Readers here may be familiar with the archive.org-affiliated effort by a team specifically working to recreate the playability of old PC (and otherwise) video games with JSMESS. > this does go a long way to solving the problem of dynamic sites Maybe, but the "dynamic" aspect that I'm sure the other person had in mind doesn't have much to do with the D in DHTML so much as it has to do with the dynamism that arises when you have a smart server responding to requests from a fat, JS-powered frontend. It would be possible to accurately model this in and execute it from a series of static assets, in some cases, but it's rarely done. Even many sites built with static site generators today are not going to be usable in the future. There's too much tight coupling to the environment/deployment configuration and not enough semantic richness to properly hint to the crawler what resources are necessary to archive. In the heydey of XML, it used to be a big deal to strive for machine readable documents. Today's resume-driven development-obsessed webdevs effectively cast a vote of no confidence even in HTML, doing an end-run around it daily, and figuratively holding up a middle finger to the Principle of Least Power. https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html#PLP https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html#PLP To some extent, even a bunch of the projects associated with TBL's Solid initiative are guilty of doing the same.