7 ms·

This page is designed to last (2019)

132 points by smoyer 5y ago

chaostheory 5y ago
If you’re worried about future dead links, you could just use the pinboard bookmarking service with the archive website plan…
- Veen 5y ago
  Gwern has written about link archiving to combat link rot, but his system seems more complex than most people would want to bother with. https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs
  - skyfaller 5y ago
    That seems like an understatement. If your link archiving system somehow relies on Bitcoin(?!) it may be too complicated.
    - post-it 5y ago
      They use Bitcoin to save hashes of the webpages in case they need to prove that they saved a page on a particular date (though I don't see how they could prove that the page they saved is the page that was actually online). That's a pretty sensible use of what are essentially NFTs.
threatofrain 5y ago
IMO this feels like a somewhat random brainstorm about how to keep an older vision of the web. For example, why focus on behind-the-scenes dev process? What % of indie sites die due to dev build process? Very hard to know and Jeff doesn't provide any edge on insight over this problem. Without knowing that, focusing on things like whether to use git (???) and whether you compress your site... seems confusing. > And how should your version control that file? Should you use git? Shove them in an 'old/' folder? Well I like the simple approach of naming old files with the date they are retired, like index.20191213.html. Anyways, this appears to be a pitch for a project: https://irchiver.com https://irchiver.com
- danuker 5y ago
  The Irchiver project has great ideas ("seeing is keeping"). Does anyone know a similar tool for Linux or a browser extension?
  - lazyjeff 5y ago
    irchiver author here. So I investigated for a long time whether a browser extension is possible for automatically screenshotting a page. It turns out it's not because of the limitations of browser extensions themselves, and from the way WebExtensions are going, it will never be. I've only found a way to do this on Windows right now (since Windows 8.1) due to an undocumented flag that lets you capture images from the browser even with hardware acceleration on (which is the default). Though I trust Microsoft to maintain backwards compatibility even for undocumented features indefinitely.
- lazyjeff 5y ago
  It's a fair critique. But I think the maintenance and dependencies for a website are the main reason a lot of them die off (basically, the owner giving up on it because the cost to keep it up is higher than the value it provides the owner). Intentionally killing a website seems rare to me otherwise. > whether you compress your site It's actually a comment against minimizing the html/css content, which makes it unreadable and adds an extra step in your toolchain (another point of failure). > Anyways, this appears to be a pitch for a project I did add that link recently as it's related, but I wrote this Designed to Last article 2 years before irchiver. See the previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21840140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21840140
canadianwriter 5y ago
I think about this often and it's very scary to me. I wrote a whole article on how I try to achieve longevity. https://kolemcrae.com/notebook/longevity.html https://kolemcrae.com/notebook/longevity.html I also switched my whole site to pure html and css, but it depends on Bootstrap, which maybe is something I should remove and only add the classes I use.
- jsmith99 5y ago
  So long as you use pre compiled bootstrap and host it yourself, I don't see how it's a longevity threat.
ffe4b5 5y ago
A browser extension to archive pages: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile
panic 5y ago
One way to keep something alive for a long time is to make many copies of it in different places. What if every time a website linked to something static (like an article, puzzle, or tutorial), it saved a local copy and made a link to that copy available as well? More inbound links would mean more longevity instead of more fragility.
arendtio 5y ago
> Designed to Last Well, I hope Jeff didn't put too much time into finding the color pallet. I don't want to be negative, but this background color just makes we want to run away/close the page. Maybe these links which I collected over the years can be helpful: - https://www.colorcombos.com https://www.colorcombos.com - https://paletton.com https://paletton.com - https://blog.datawrapper.de/beautifulcolors/ https://blog.datawrapper.de/beautifulcolors/ - https://design.lyft.com/re-approaching-color-9e604ba22c88 https://design.lyft.com/re-approaching-color-9e604ba22c88 (ColorBox)
- lelandfe 5y ago
  There's no fundamental problem with the color chosen, so those last two probably won't be of much use. Anyway, I have no problems with the background. Curious you had that visceral of a reaction
- toomim 5y ago
  Wow, that's funny. I really enjoyed the colors he chose! It must be a matter of taste.
- chihuahua 5y ago
  The orange color seems quite harmless, and the text is still black on white. Plus you can get the orange borders to go away by resizing the window. So I really don't see the problem.
sharps_xp 5y ago
i share the same mindset as i really miss traveling but the only way to explore places to go when i’m abroad is yelp, google maps, and my own excel sheet. all of which are very slow on international sim cards or in remote areas. i’m thinking about building my own yelp-like site which is just static content on a cdn, images would by default show the “alt” text with an option to download the image.
foodbag 5y ago
I like the sound of "Don't minimize that HTML". It'd be nice if the HTML of webpages was more transparent. > Well, you don't save much because your web pages should be gzipped before being sent over the network, so preemptively shrinking your content probably doesn't do much to save bandwidth if anything at all. Does anybody have empirical evidence on how much minify + gzip saves over just gzip?
- spurgu 5y ago
  > Does anybody have empirical evidence on how much minify + gzip saves over just gzip? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/807119/gzip-versus-minify https://stackoverflow.com/questions/807119/gzip-versus-minif...
- datagram 5y ago
  Decided to try it out using the source for this page as an example, with kangax's HTML minifier (https://kangax.github.io/html-minifier/ https://kangax.github.io/html-minifier/) Uncompressed, Unminified: 16,979B Uncompressed, Minified: 16,316B Ccompressed, Unminified: 7676B Compressed, Minified: 7535B So minifying before compressing saves an extra 141 bytes, but the vast majority of the size savings are from Gzip
shrimpx 5y ago
The obvious alternative advice is if you want it to last, keep working at it, keep maintaining it, keep upgrading it. Don't spend a bunch of time on work that is meant to be abandoned, which to me implies that it's not that meaningful. The OP's message has a kernel of general truth in it, but if I interpret it in the context of CS academic research, the much larger problem is that the vast majority of CS projects are published and immediately abandoned.
alkonaut 5y ago
The internet is self-cleaning. Materials that no one cares to maintain rots away. It’s more like a city than a library. Houses need to be maintained and used or they eventually become unusable and will be torn down and replaced or simply abandoned. I think some early thoughts about the web was that it was going to be a library of knowledge. Those ideas were misguided I think. It’s a chaotic city and it probably always will be. The article makes some good points about how to increase longevity and while it can certainly help, it probably won’t make a huge difference in most cases.
- dexen 5y ago
  Underrated insight. I believe it parallels the natural lifecycle of materials inside libraries: content gets retired at all times, while still largely maintaining appearance of "everything at your fingertips".
- deegles 5y ago
  And sometimes the Library of Alexandria burns down…
- Joker_vD 5y ago
  I assure you, books and libraries need maintenance too. The old books has to be reprinted if you want to keep using them as actual books (e.g. read) instead of museum exhibits.
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time: This Page is Designed to Last - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21840140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21840140 - Dec 2019 (446 comments)
Brajeshwar 5y ago
I have been on this whole journey of plain-text, longevity, legacy, and similar ideas. I recently moved my 20+ year old blog[1] to a plain-text (Markdown) and will continue to make it simpler that it should continue to last as long as it can be served out of the simplest hosting possible. HTML in its raw form is very hard to read. I wanted something simple enough but still has some formatting[2] -- Markdown did that while I avoid spicing it up with formatting. Right now, it is on Github and if needed, my 13-year old can edit directly there and it will update my website. I hope that in few years, I shouldn't have to rely on Github either but, hopefully, decentralized that it is somewhere/everywhere on the Internet that it will live it as long as my domain is renewed. 1. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/ https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/ 2. https://github.com/brajeshwar/brajeshwar.github.io https://github.com/brajeshwar/brajeshwar.github.io
- lmm 5y ago
  I agree with the original markdown git repo being what's important. I treat the whole web stack as an implementation detail for rendering the markdown I wrote, so I've set my blog up as just serving a minimal header and footer to render that markdown as a web page (using strapdown.js), so that it's still fairly readable in raw HTML form and you can read it with telnet in a pinch. IMO that's a lot more valuable than worrying about progressive enhancement or no-script functionality when your page still requires a hugely complex CSS/HTML engine to render it.
  - Brajeshwar 5y ago
    Cool. Looking at Strapdown.js - https://strapdownjs.com https://strapdownjs.com
strenholme 5y ago
I agree with the general sentiment of the page, with one exception: It’s better to use WOFF webfonts for the fonts on the page instead of using what were “Web safe” fonts back in 2005 or so. With the rise of Android phones which, by and large, do not have licenses for the old 1990s “Microsoft Core Fonts” (Verdana/Gerogia/Arial/etc.), doing something like “font-family: Georgia, Serif” no longer guarantees a consistent look from platform to platform. What I use is a heavily optimized and subsetted web font stack which is placed in a single 114KB CSS file separate from the web page; I use inline fonts instead of linking to individual font files to remove the number of pages needed to load to render my page. I use WOFF for maximum browser compatibility, although this is becoming a non-issue with Microsoft seriously sunsetting IE11. This way, my webpage will look the same in any web browser with WOFF support, regardless of what fonts a given phone or OS use for “Georgia” or what not. In addition, with the exceptions of Arial and Georgia, the Microsoft Core fonts are quite dated looking; using Verdana here in 2021 gives the page a “made in the first 2000s decade” look to it. I also, for browsers without WOFF, have a fairly long font stack, so that the web page looks reasonable even without a webfont.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  I wish browsers came with some kind of configuration panel for fonts. All the font control I wish to give websites is the choice between serif and sans-serif. Let web fonts be opt-in rather than opt-out. Let the browser pick a good one and be done with it, no need for every website to transfer an entire font file to my computer. Browsers already used to have some kind of control for this, though on mobile you don't really see it often anymore. Designers seem to put a lot of value in fonts but I honestly don't care. Most of the fancy fonts decrease readability and just serve some kind of desire by the designer to have a certain brand. I don't care about your brand because 99% of the time I won't ever come back to your website and even if I do, it won't be because you picked out some bespoke almost-Arial-but-not-really font.
  - strenholme 5y ago
    I wish browsers came with some kind of configuration panel for fonts. Your wish has been granted. In Firefox: * Click on the hamburger menu in the upper right hand side (the three horizontal lines) * Choose “Adjustments” or “Configuration” * Scroll down and look for “Language and Appearance“ * Choose “Latin” in the top of the “fonts for” menu * Click on “advanced” * Choose a suitable sans, serif, and monospace font * Unclick the “Let webpages choose their own fonts, instead of the fonts above” * Click on “OK” Wording in quotes is approximate.
tomxor 5y ago
> But the solution needs to be multi-pronged. How do we make web content that can last and be maintained for at least 10 years? I've a boring solution to add to this list to address hosting. It's boring, dependable, and sadly no one will likely ever use it: Encourage users to download your web pages. The skeuomorphic label of "bookmark" really doesn't fulfil it's metaphor. Books don't change when you insert bookmarks, you can keep them around for decades, fingerprints, underlines and all - revisit them later in life and no external dependencies beyond keeping a roof over them will affect those properties. The nature of the web as hosted on remote servers is a moving target, "bookmarks" are merely links on a clock waiting to be broken, it's inevitable. Making lean downloadable front end content is not hard (for the vast majority of content), but unpopular, convincing authors to do it is hard. Harder still is convincing a society spoiled by the convenience of search engines to embraces such an antiquated idea: downloading content for the value of some guaranteed, localised permanence. Perhaps the best chance we have outside of more radical "IPFS" ideas, to extend the existing web, might be to simply build this into the browser, probably a plug-in at first - something that changes bookmark into bookcase. Browsers can already sort of "save" a web page, they just need to do it in a scalable way to try to accommodate the way most web pages are not built in a self contained manner. e.g back it with a content addressed file system or database. At which point it's feasible to turn this into a simple button without taking up 20MB for every page.

132 points by smoyer 5y ago

If you’re worried about future dead links, you could just use the pinboard bookmarking service with the archive website plan…

Veen 5y ago
Gwern has written about link archiving to combat link rot, but his system seems more complex than most people would want to bother with. https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs
- skyfaller 5y ago
  That seems like an understatement. If your link archiving system somehow relies on Bitcoin(?!) it may be too complicated.
  - post-it 5y ago
    They use Bitcoin to save hashes of the webpages in case they need to prove that they saved a page on a particular date (though I don't see how they could prove that the page they saved is the page that was actually online). That's a pretty sensible use of what are essentially NFTs.

threatofrain 5y ago

IMO this feels like a somewhat random brainstorm about how to keep an older vision of the web. For example, why focus on behind-the-scenes dev process? What % of indie sites die due to dev build process? Very hard to know and Jeff doesn't provide any edge on insight over this problem. Without knowing that, focusing on things like whether to use git (???) and whether you compress your site... seems confusing. > And how should your version control that file? Should you use git? Shove them in an 'old/' folder? Well I like the simple approach of naming old files with the date they are retired, like index.20191213.html. Anyways, this appears to be a pitch for a project: https://irchiver.com https://irchiver.com

danuker 5y ago
The Irchiver project has great ideas ("seeing is keeping"). Does anyone know a similar tool for Linux or a browser extension?
- lazyjeff 5y ago
  irchiver author here. So I investigated for a long time whether a browser extension is possible for automatically screenshotting a page. It turns out it's not because of the limitations of browser extensions themselves, and from the way WebExtensions are going, it will never be. I've only found a way to do this on Windows right now (since Windows 8.1) due to an undocumented flag that lets you capture images from the browser even with hardware acceleration on (which is the default). Though I trust Microsoft to maintain backwards compatibility even for undocumented features indefinitely.
lazyjeff 5y ago
It's a fair critique. But I think the maintenance and dependencies for a website are the main reason a lot of them die off (basically, the owner giving up on it because the cost to keep it up is higher than the value it provides the owner). Intentionally killing a website seems rare to me otherwise. > whether you compress your site It's actually a comment against minimizing the html/css content, which makes it unreadable and adds an extra step in your toolchain (another point of failure). > Anyways, this appears to be a pitch for a project I did add that link recently as it's related, but I wrote this Designed to Last article 2 years before irchiver. See the previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21840140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21840140

canadianwriter 5y ago

I think about this often and it's very scary to me. I wrote a whole article on how I try to achieve longevity. https://kolemcrae.com/notebook/longevity.html https://kolemcrae.com/notebook/longevity.html I also switched my whole site to pure html and css, but it depends on Bootstrap, which maybe is something I should remove and only add the classes I use.

jsmith99 5y ago
So long as you use pre compiled bootstrap and host it yourself, I don't see how it's a longevity threat.

ffe4b5 5y ago

A browser extension to archive pages: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

panic 5y ago

One way to keep something alive for a long time is to make many copies of it in different places. What if every time a website linked to something static (like an article, puzzle, or tutorial), it saved a local copy and made a link to that copy available as well? More inbound links would mean more longevity instead of more fragility.

arendtio 5y ago

> Designed to Last Well, I hope Jeff didn't put too much time into finding the color pallet. I don't want to be negative, but this background color just makes we want to run away/close the page. Maybe these links which I collected over the years can be helpful: - https://www.colorcombos.com https://www.colorcombos.com - https://paletton.com https://paletton.com - https://blog.datawrapper.de/beautifulcolors/ https://blog.datawrapper.de/beautifulcolors/ - https://design.lyft.com/re-approaching-color-9e604ba22c88 https://design.lyft.com/re-approaching-color-9e604ba22c88 (ColorBox)

lelandfe 5y ago
There's no fundamental problem with the color chosen, so those last two probably won't be of much use. Anyway, I have no problems with the background. Curious you had that visceral of a reaction
toomim 5y ago
Wow, that's funny. I really enjoyed the colors he chose! It must be a matter of taste.
chihuahua 5y ago
The orange color seems quite harmless, and the text is still black on white. Plus you can get the orange borders to go away by resizing the window. So I really don't see the problem.

sharps_xp 5y ago

i share the same mindset as i really miss traveling but the only way to explore places to go when i’m abroad is yelp, google maps, and my own excel sheet. all of which are very slow on international sim cards or in remote areas. i’m thinking about building my own yelp-like site which is just static content on a cdn, images would by default show the “alt” text with an option to download the image.

foodbag 5y ago

I like the sound of "Don't minimize that HTML". It'd be nice if the HTML of webpages was more transparent. > Well, you don't save much because your web pages should be gzipped before being sent over the network, so preemptively shrinking your content probably doesn't do much to save bandwidth if anything at all. Does anybody have empirical evidence on how much minify + gzip saves over just gzip?

spurgu 5y ago
> Does anybody have empirical evidence on how much minify + gzip saves over just gzip? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/807119/gzip-versus-minify https://stackoverflow.com/questions/807119/gzip-versus-minif...
datagram 5y ago
Decided to try it out using the source for this page as an example, with kangax's HTML minifier (https://kangax.github.io/html-minifier/ https://kangax.github.io/html-minifier/) Uncompressed, Unminified: 16,979B Uncompressed, Minified: 16,316B Ccompressed, Unminified: 7676B Compressed, Minified: 7535B So minifying before compressing saves an extra 141 bytes, but the vast majority of the size savings are from Gzip

shrimpx 5y ago

The obvious alternative advice is if you want it to last, keep working at it, keep maintaining it, keep upgrading it. Don't spend a bunch of time on work that is meant to be abandoned, which to me implies that it's not that meaningful. The OP's message has a kernel of general truth in it, but if I interpret it in the context of CS academic research, the much larger problem is that the vast majority of CS projects are published and immediately abandoned.

alkonaut 5y ago

The internet is self-cleaning. Materials that no one cares to maintain rots away. It’s more like a city than a library. Houses need to be maintained and used or they eventually become unusable and will be torn down and replaced or simply abandoned. I think some early thoughts about the web was that it was going to be a library of knowledge. Those ideas were misguided I think. It’s a chaotic city and it probably always will be. The article makes some good points about how to increase longevity and while it can certainly help, it probably won’t make a huge difference in most cases.

dexen 5y ago
Underrated insight. I believe it parallels the natural lifecycle of materials inside libraries: content gets retired at all times, while still largely maintaining appearance of "everything at your fingertips".
deegles 5y ago
And sometimes the Library of Alexandria burns down…
Joker_vD 5y ago
I assure you, books and libraries need maintenance too. The old books has to be reprinted if you want to keep using them as actual books (e.g. read) instead of museum exhibits.

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time: This Page is Designed to Last - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21840140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21840140 - Dec 2019 (446 comments)

Brajeshwar 5y ago

I have been on this whole journey of plain-text, longevity, legacy, and similar ideas. I recently moved my 20+ year old blog[1] to a plain-text (Markdown) and will continue to make it simpler that it should continue to last as long as it can be served out of the simplest hosting possible. HTML in its raw form is very hard to read. I wanted something simple enough but still has some formatting[2] -- Markdown did that while I avoid spicing it up with formatting. Right now, it is on Github and if needed, my 13-year old can edit directly there and it will update my website. I hope that in few years, I shouldn't have to rely on Github either but, hopefully, decentralized that it is somewhere/everywhere on the Internet that it will live it as long as my domain is renewed. 1. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/ https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/ 2. https://github.com/brajeshwar/brajeshwar.github.io https://github.com/brajeshwar/brajeshwar.github.io

lmm 5y ago
I agree with the original markdown git repo being what's important. I treat the whole web stack as an implementation detail for rendering the markdown I wrote, so I've set my blog up as just serving a minimal header and footer to render that markdown as a web page (using strapdown.js), so that it's still fairly readable in raw HTML form and you can read it with telnet in a pinch. IMO that's a lot more valuable than worrying about progressive enhancement or no-script functionality when your page still requires a hugely complex CSS/HTML engine to render it.
- Brajeshwar 5y ago
  Cool. Looking at Strapdown.js - https://strapdownjs.com https://strapdownjs.com

strenholme 5y ago

I agree with the general sentiment of the page, with one exception: It’s better to use WOFF webfonts for the fonts on the page instead of using what were “Web safe” fonts back in 2005 or so. With the rise of Android phones which, by and large, do not have licenses for the old 1990s “Microsoft Core Fonts” (Verdana/Gerogia/Arial/etc.), doing something like “font-family: Georgia, Serif” no longer guarantees a consistent look from platform to platform. What I use is a heavily optimized and subsetted web font stack which is placed in a single 114KB CSS file separate from the web page; I use inline fonts instead of linking to individual font files to remove the number of pages needed to load to render my page. I use WOFF for maximum browser compatibility, although this is becoming a non-issue with Microsoft seriously sunsetting IE11. This way, my webpage will look the same in any web browser with WOFF support, regardless of what fonts a given phone or OS use for “Georgia” or what not. In addition, with the exceptions of Arial and Georgia, the Microsoft Core fonts are quite dated looking; using Verdana here in 2021 gives the page a “made in the first 2000s decade” look to it. I also, for browsers without WOFF, have a fairly long font stack, so that the web page looks reasonable even without a webfont.

jeroenhd 5y ago
I wish browsers came with some kind of configuration panel for fonts. All the font control I wish to give websites is the choice between serif and sans-serif. Let web fonts be opt-in rather than opt-out. Let the browser pick a good one and be done with it, no need for every website to transfer an entire font file to my computer. Browsers already used to have some kind of control for this, though on mobile you don't really see it often anymore. Designers seem to put a lot of value in fonts but I honestly don't care. Most of the fancy fonts decrease readability and just serve some kind of desire by the designer to have a certain brand. I don't care about your brand because 99% of the time I won't ever come back to your website and even if I do, it won't be because you picked out some bespoke almost-Arial-but-not-really font.
- strenholme 5y ago
  I wish browsers came with some kind of configuration panel for fonts. Your wish has been granted. In Firefox: * Click on the hamburger menu in the upper right hand side (the three horizontal lines) * Choose “Adjustments” or “Configuration” * Scroll down and look for “Language and Appearance“ * Choose “Latin” in the top of the “fonts for” menu * Click on “advanced” * Choose a suitable sans, serif, and monospace font * Unclick the “Let webpages choose their own fonts, instead of the fonts above” * Click on “OK” Wording in quotes is approximate.

tomxor 5y ago

> But the solution needs to be multi-pronged. How do we make web content that can last and be maintained for at least 10 years? I've a boring solution to add to this list to address hosting. It's boring, dependable, and sadly no one will likely ever use it: Encourage users to download your web pages. The skeuomorphic label of "bookmark" really doesn't fulfil it's metaphor. Books don't change when you insert bookmarks, you can keep them around for decades, fingerprints, underlines and all - revisit them later in life and no external dependencies beyond keeping a roof over them will affect those properties. The nature of the web as hosted on remote servers is a moving target, "bookmarks" are merely links on a clock waiting to be broken, it's inevitable. Making lean downloadable front end content is not hard (for the vast majority of content), but unpopular, convincing authors to do it is hard. Harder still is convincing a society spoiled by the convenience of search engines to embraces such an antiquated idea: downloading content for the value of some guaranteed, localised permanence. Perhaps the best chance we have outside of more radical "IPFS" ideas, to extend the existing web, might be to simply build this into the browser, probably a plug-in at first - something that changes bookmark into bookcase. Browsers can already sort of "save" a web page, they just need to do it in a scalable way to try to accommodate the way most web pages are not built in a self contained manner. e.g back it with a content addressed file system or database. At which point it's feasible to turn this into a simple button without taking up 20MB for every page.