This Page is Designed to Last
Bookmark after bookmark led to dead link after dead link. What's vanished: unique pieces of writing on kuro5hin about tech culture; a collection of mathematical puzzles and their associated discussion by academics that my father introduced me to; Woodman's Reverse Engineering tutorials from my high school years, where I first tasted the feeling of control over software; even my most recent bookmark, a series of posts on Google+ exposing usb-c chargers' non-compliance with the specification, all disappeared.
The problem is multi-faceted. First, content takes effort to maintain. [...] Second, a growing set of libraries and frameworks are making the web more sophisticated but also more complex.
So my proposal is seven unconventional guidelines in how we handle websites designed to be informative, to make them easy to maintain and preserve:
How do we make web content that can last and be maintained for at least 10 years?
But I think we should consider both 1) the casual web content "maintainer", someone who doesn't constantly stay up to date with the latest web technologies, which means the website needs to have low maintenance needs; 2) and the crawlers who preserve the content and personal archivers, the "archiver", which means the website should be easy to save and interpret.
- Return to vanilla HTML/CSS
- End all forms of hotlinking
- Stick with native fonts
- Obsessively compress your images
- Eliminate the broken URL risk
- [...]
But let's say some small part of the web starts designing websites to last for content that is meant to last. What happens then? Well, people may prefer to link to them since they have a promise of working in the future. People more generally may be more mindful of making their pages more permanent. And users and archivers both save bandwidth when visiting and storing these pages.