3 ms·
The fundamental problem with the Web is that archival was never part of its job. You send HTTP queries to the server and it answers. If somebody switches that s
by grumbel 5y ago
The fundamental problem with the Web is that archival was never part of its job. You send HTTP queries to the server and it answers. If somebody switches that server off, all that information is gone. Even just updating the server will inevitably destroy the content. You can try to preserve it with well named URLs, mirror it and such, but it's a lossy process. There was never a mechanism to keep URLs working long term and even if an URL still works, you can't tell if the content is still the same that was there back when the Link was created.
As bad as the modern centralization is in a lot of other ways, I actually quite like the way Youtube works. Every video gets a unique id, a permanent URL and is immutable (with some exceptions). That means most videos from the very early days of Youtube are still around and accessible, while most of the Web of that time is long gone.
The Web really could need a more robust way to publish content, just throwing stuff on a server really isn't cutting it.
- go_prodev 5y agoI wonder if Web3 will help to solve this? (Being decentralized)
- egypturnash 5y agoIt’s on the blockchain forever! ...as long as someone finds it worth paying the costs of continuing to run the blockchain, and the people who run 51% of it don’t decide to wipe out or change anything, and...
- JasonFruit 5y ago'Archival' is an adjective. The gerund 'archiving' works nicely and is grammatical.
- groovy2shoes 5y agoIt's a substantive. It fits here fine.
- JasonFruit 5y agoYou may have a point. I'm going to go reevaluate my entire worldview for a bit. EDIT: nope, still not buying it. I can only make it work by analogy with bury->burial, archive->archival, and there's not enough there.
- groovy2shoes 5y agoWiktionary gives a larger (but still not comprehensive) list: (forming nouns, especially of verbal action.): arousal, arrival, bestowal, betrothal, denial, disposal, proposal, rental, rival, reversal, removal, subdual, submittal, transmittal https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-al#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-al#English That said, substantivization of adjectives is common. Even adjective is itself a word that was originally an adjective, but has been substantivized into a noun. It's a well-known linguistic process: "Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(word_formation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(word_formation) This process has become especially common in Modern English as inflexional endings have been abandoned and speakers rely almost entirely on word order to deduce parts of speech. Converting a word from one part of speech to another simply involves putting it into the proper place in the sequence. However, substantivization of adjectives is not exclusive to English (in Latin, for example, you can slap practically any adjective into the neuter and use it as a noun, whence we receive such words as animal and dual). Language in general is very flexible.