Go through 5+ year old bookmarks to find all of them dead, this will show how permanent books seem compared to digital publications. They truly are "time machines" for how temporal information is today.
It's the same with photographs. We take more photos than ever before, but we lose more photos than ever before.
iCloud is not archival or long term storage, people lose access, or accidentally delete photos or whatever. Meanwhile, all my childhood photos are safely stored as negatives. Of course, my parents' house could burn down and all my childhood photos could be lost, but that's unlikely.
That's one reason that I've been enjoying film photography. I know that my negatives will easily last 50+ years if stored with some care.
We really need a solution for long term file storage for the average person. I plan on putting my digital photos onto archival DVDs at some point and storing them with my negatives. But even archival DVDs have problems, namely that it assumes we'll have DVD readers in 50 years. Meanwhile, we'll still be able to scan photographic negatives in 50 years, and to circle back to books, we'll be able to read books in 50 years.
Would be great if we could download a webpage and guarantee it will always work. These days, however, I imagine lots of pages require runtime fetching of data via javascript. The alternative is whole-page screenshots but you lose the accessibility of the text within. I kind of miss the days when the web was just HTML.
Back in the days when the web was just Flash, it wasn't as easy as Ctrl+S to save content you wanted to keep. In a few years, you may need to spin a VM with an older OS to launch a flash-able browser. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#End_of_life)
It's not much easier with Java applets since Oracle tightened applet security (requiring everything to be signed, which the old applets aren't), and deprecating the plugin altogether.
I had to jump through hoops to get an applet I wrote only 10 years ago running.
You can save the current dom you're viewing no matter how interactively it got there, to something like maff / mhtml, or print to pdf and you'll have access to the text & images.
I personally prefer mhtml, though with the recent breakage with firefox, I've been doing PDF.
Archiving something interactive.. that's a different story.
For some URLs given one of their old Wayback Machine entries it would be nice to be able to render those in their contemporaneous browser environments (e.g., going way back maybe Mosaic 3.0 or IE 10) to maybe then have a chance of working with some close facsimile of the original interface and functionality.
Do you have a recommendation for "my own knowledge database", and also, do you have a recommendation for one that benefits everyone, not just me? When appropriate, of course.
- For you: Depends on what your software preferences are. Evernote is the obvious choice for most consumers, but I personally use org-mode in emacs + recoll for indexing.
- "one that benefits everyone": probably wikipedia+scihub, but I think you would have already guessed that. A knowledge database that benefits everyone looks a lot like the internet, minus the serving issues. So probably something closer to ipfs.
iCloud is not archival or long term storage, people lose access, or accidentally delete photos or whatever. Meanwhile, all my childhood photos are safely stored as negatives. Of course, my parents' house could burn down and all my childhood photos could be lost, but that's unlikely.
That's one reason that I've been enjoying film photography. I know that my negatives will easily last 50+ years if stored with some care.
We really need a solution for long term file storage for the average person. I plan on putting my digital photos onto archival DVDs at some point and storing them with my negatives. But even archival DVDs have problems, namely that it assumes we'll have DVD readers in 50 years. Meanwhile, we'll still be able to scan photographic negatives in 50 years, and to circle back to books, we'll be able to read books in 50 years.