Where did the web archive go?
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
> Abstract. To perform a longitudinal investigation of web archives and detecting variations and changes replaying individual archived pages, or mementos, we created a sample of 16,627 mementos from 17 public web archives. Over the course of our 14-month study (November, 2017– January, 2019), we found that four web archives changed their baseURIs and did not leave a machine-readable method of locating their new base URIs, necessitating manual rediscovery. Of the 1,981 mementos in our sample from these four web archives, 537 were impacted: 517 mementos were rediscovered but with changes in their time of archiving(or Memento-Datetime), HTTP status code, or the string comprising their original URI (or URI-R), and 20 of the mementos could not be found at all.
Being surrounded by designers at the time, all who became developers soon after, the loss of elementary design and UI knowledge I believe is due to the vacuum left behind when the on ramp to get a Internet job became programmatic instead of visual arts.
However possibly the same effect can't happen in the same way again because early in the century coding for the web meant mainly fancy graphics and Flash, nothing related to let alone connected with the plumbing.
(ActionSctipt was good enough for a friend who was a novice but desiccated and earnest programmer to write a Flash demo of a insulin regulator device that was so good his simulation from the specifications was used as a reference through to certification of the C and assembly embedded implementation. A ESP8266 for ActionSctipt would be awesome. This guy lost windows for Linux the instant the penny dropped that the greatest most important barrier to this profession, for the majority, is voodoo FUD and a matter of self confidence and reading the right books. This most recent generation doesn't seem to have a equivalent reading culture similar to how we assembled libraries of O'Reilley titles in our offices and homes - everyone who I remember purchased additional titles in fields that they didn't know about, every single time they bought required references something additional got smuggled into patiently awaiting brains. I copied this at my office letting anyone add a extra title every ten references. This almost immediately became a proper budget for a library but suddenly the requests dried up unexpectedly. We realised the attraction was having snuck the expense onto the job budget people took them home to read only afterwards bringing them back into circulation out of unnecessary sensitivity. This is why I passionately hate hermetically sealed corporate systems. Creativity needs inspiration even from a little lisp (or whatever) learning larceny.
https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html
It has always bugged me, e.g. to get 403: Forbidden when the intended message and situation is 401: Unauthorised.
I am mesmerised to this day why HTTP, maybe a rapidly enforced required HTTP/1.2 spec, didn't make it mandatory for servers to enforce strict management of URI errors especially, together with a crud layer of enforcement and even FTP protocol extensions for providing a UI to enable intelligent use as standard. For example :
if you follow the standard date formats including the date in the filename, it's trivial to implement
300: Multiple Choices
whenever you confirm that you really do want to upload
_National_News_Headlines_for_1995.12.25.htm
after _National_News_Headlines_for_1995.12.24.htm
The existence of Archive.Org has led me to conclude that everyone has assumed that the problem is solved. We all know - here - how far that is from any consistent definition of reality.
Quis archivet ipsos archives?
(Loose amateur translation, note that verbs for tabularium and archivum were not attested in my brief check.)