23 votes

This Page is Designed to Last

7 comments

  1. [2]
    skybrian
    Link
    I have mixed feelings about this. While I'm sympathetic to the impulse to save everything "for history" and have often indulged it, letting at least some of it go also has an appeal. My old...

    I have mixed feelings about this. While I'm sympathetic to the impulse to save everything "for history" and have often indulged it, letting at least some of it go also has an appeal.

    My old personal blog is preserved in amber with cool links that don't change, but it was never very popular and is effectively dead. I don't think it has much value now, even to me, but thinking I needed to preserve that content when restarting a blog was holding me back from doing any blogging elsewhere.

    I backed up all my Google+ posts before it shut down, but then when I went through the data dump, I realized that I didn't see anything I wanted to preserve and I didn't bother to revive any of it. It seems that link blogging gets stale quickly? I don't look at my old Twitter posts either.

    I have a complete history of all my email since I started using Gmail, and never search back that far. I also have backup archives of several years of email from before Gmail and never bothered to get them into an easy-to-use, searchable format. Was it worth preserving? I never feel the need to look at it.

    I think family photos and personal creative projects are well worth preserving, but I'm not at all sure about Internet chatter. When going through a relative's stuff after they die, there are things you want to keep and things you throw away and wonder why they ever kept them, and I think the same is true of our digital stuff.

    11 votes
    1. vord
      Link Parent
      I think the key point is that this is primarily for information-driven sites, less so chatter like Twitter/G+/email. Here's some sites that would benefit immensely from all of this advice: News...

      I think the key point is that this is primarily for information-driven sites, less so chatter like Twitter/G+/email.

      Here's some sites that would benefit immensely from all of this advice:

      • News sites (worst offenders)
      • How-to guides
      • Documentation
      • Forums (tildes is a great model to follow)

      These guidelines, on top of making it easier to archive, also make it easier for search engines to find what's relevant.

      If every site followed these guidelines, archiving and attributing becomes trivially easy.

      7 votes
  2. onyxleopard
    Link
    Hear, hear! The web seems to be dying because people want to treat it as an application platform rather than a document publication platform. Browsers with JavaScript engines are the application...

    Hear, hear!

    The web seems to be dying because people want to treat it as an application platform rather than a document publication platform. Browsers with JavaScript engines are the application platform. Let the web just be HTML/CSS and don’t overthink it.

    Also, support search engines besides Google so that we don’t end up in a world of AMP and other proprietary junk that will ultimately kill the web.

    10 votes
  3. skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    [M]y proposal is seven unconventional guidelines in how we handle websites designed to be informative, to make them easy to maintain and preserve. The guiding intention is that the maintainer will try to keep the website up for at least 10 years. These are not controversial views necessarily, but are aspirations that are not mainstream—a manifesto for a long-lasting website.

    1. Return to vanilla HTML/CSS [...]
    2. Don't minimize that HTML [...]
    3. Prefer one page over several [...]
    4. End all forms of hotlinking [...]
    5. Stick with the 13 web safe fonts +2 [...]
    6. Obsessively compress your images [...]
    7. Eliminate the broken URL risk – there are monitoring services that will tell you when your URL is down [...] But to eliminate the risk of a URL breaking completely, set up a second monitoring service. [...] Remember that we're trying to keep something up for over 10 years, so a lot of services will shut down during this period, so two monitoring services is the safer way. Also, register your domain name for 10 years out (the maximum), so you don't have to worry about it for a while. Domain name lapses are a common reason for losing a website.
    8 votes
  4. Akir
    Link
    I agree with the author generally, but I disagree with some of the steps he takes. There is no reason to not use fancy fonts as long as you are hosting those fonts alongside your documents. And...

    I agree with the author generally, but I disagree with some of the steps he takes. There is no reason to not use fancy fonts as long as you are hosting those fonts alongside your documents. And while I also think that it's not necessary to minify your HTML or CSS, I don't think that the 'educational' aspects are useful to maintain.

    But by all means, please use plain HTML and CSS. If you are publishing something I am expecting to read and learn from, the thing you are publishing is called a document and should be served as a document. By all means, do not create a web application that will overwrite the behaviors of the browser.

    4 votes
  5. [2]
    unknown user
    Link
    The author's proposals don't all seem particularly relevant to the end goal of "keeping your website a available for as long as possible", I have to say. Just registering your domain name for 10...

    The author's proposals don't all seem particularly relevant to the end goal of "keeping your website a available for as long as possible", I have to say. Just registering your domain name for 10 years will probably do that, if your hosting provider doesn't go out of business.

    For example, "using custom fonts" seems unlikely to make your website disappear any time sooner; it might look different if the external service you pull your fonts from goes away, but it'll still be possible to read your content.

    2 votes
    1. onyxleopard
      Link Parent
      There is 'available' and there is 'accessible as intended'. Sure you could have a registered domain that serves a 404 for 10 years. That isn’t the point.

      The author's proposals don't all seem particularly relevant to the end goal of "keeping your website a available for as long as possible", I have to say. Just registering your domain name for 10 years will probably do that, if your hosting provider doesn't go out of business.

      There is 'available' and there is 'accessible as intended'. Sure you could have a registered domain that serves a 404 for 10 years. That isn’t the point.

      2 votes