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Trouble is, the days of pointing to an HTML page and expecting it not to 404 are gone.
The web is not a body of public record. It is not an archive.
The trend in the web is more and more to dynamic content -- HTML pages are served up on the fly from databases using server side scripting like PHP and ASP, formatted with CSS according to already-set cookies, and so on. A
page you once viewed may in fact be a one-off instance of a data set / presentation options, etc.
So how to reference once-published material? I think a new type of historian - the web historian - will begin taking regular snapshots of the web as a matter of public record. This is already happening at the above-mentioned site.
Maybe they have some permanent content you can use? Or maybe large websites are finding ways to create archive sections - ?
John Cornellier
PS: does anyone else remember (or did anyone archive) the brilliant circa. 1993 website "The Keepers of the Lists"? Pioneering use of CGI, forms, and dynamic user content. Gone without a trace! A copy of that site would have
historical value....
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