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No. If “without any kind of maintenance” is the test, then no. At a minimum you need to sign a contract with an organization and pre–pay for the term you expe
by epc 4y ago
No.
If “without any kind of maintenance” is the test, then no.
At a minimum you need to sign a contract with an organization and pre–pay for the term you expect them to maintain the site. And you probably need a third party to monitor that organization to ensure they’re meeting the terms of that contract. And pay them as well.
Systems fail. Systems get hacked. Organizations evolve, change, get bought, get shut down, or just die.
I bet someone, somewhere in Switzerland, is tasked with maintaining info.cern.ch and keeping the systems its on up to date and secure, even if the content is HTML 1.0 and the server is responding with HTTP/0.9. Same with the spacejam site.
Barring Internet Archive going into long term site hosting (and not just archiving content under web.archive.org, but archiving under the original host name) I don't think it's realistic to expect any site to stay up once the author/owner/originator stops maintaining it.
- epc 4y agoThe oldest extant site I had anything to do with appears to be https://park.org/ https://park.org/. My bit was the IBM Chess Challenge that seems to have evaporated. But you can see one problem with keeping a site up for 26 years. park.org is heavily imagemap dependent. Imagemaps used to be processed server side, and eventually flipped to be browser side, but required the map to be sent to the browser. No one has updated the park.org HTML to reflect this so the imagemap based navigation doesn't work. And someone does appear to be doing some sort of maintenance because the links to the 1996 Chess Challenge site appear to have been removed whenever IBM lost interest in keeping that site up.