[zbendefy]

Tangential, but Flash had a nice side effect that the "app" could be exported in a self contained way via SWF.

Exporting this site for example in a future proof way is not that obvious. (Exporting as pdf wont work with the webgl applets, exporting the html page might work but is error prone depending in the website structure)

50 years from now, flash emulators will still work on swf files, but these sites might be lost. Or is there a way to archive sites like this?

[KPGv2]

> Or is there a way to archive sites like this?

A couple days ago, someone published their archive of HN that works in any browser.

Archiving sites is easy anyway. I wrote a Scrapy app that archives everything within the a specific fandom on Ao3. TH hardest part is remembering how beautiful soup queries work.

[roywiggins]

Static sites are straightforward, yeah. Highly dynamic websites like this one commonly explode when you archive them naively.

[sneak]

There is nothing dynamic about this site in the sense of “static site”. This may well be a static site.

[roywiggins]

Wikipedia, at least, uses the same terminology as me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_web_page?wprov=sfla1

> A client-side dynamic web page processes the web page using JavaScript running in the browser as it loads.

The linked page is one of those. They're often harder to scrape than server-side rendered webforums and the like.

[lossyalgo]

I tried several "static site download" plugins such as SingleFile for FireFox and none of the sliders work :(

[mrkstu]

Server side rendered sites that are dynamic in nature- you'll only get a literal snapshot of state you happen to be in...

[roywiggins]

I mean highly dynamic, entirely frontend sites like these are hard to archive, since you have to really preserve every bit of JavaScript dependency, including any dynamically loaded dependencies, and rewire everything to work again.

And then hope that whatever browser features you rely on aren't removed in 20 years. Flash applets from 20 years ago are usually more self-contained and Just Work if you have a functioning runtime (either the official one or Ruffle)

[pava0]

I strongly suggest you try (the selfhosted version of) Browsertrix from Webrecorder, it's really well done, actively delevoped and can export the website as .wacz without problem.

[KPGv2]

> 50 years from now, flash emulators will still work on swf files

I'm not sure 50 years from now there will be flash emulators. Who is going to write on for the XP3.12345235 Fruity Ununpentium Silicon x256^2 neuralink devices.

Didn't Flash die because iPhones weren't going to support it? So one of the major OSes people spend most of their lives on can't even run SFW files. Can Android? I've honestly never tried.

But web standards persist.

[sneak]

50 years from now there will be emulators that can run the OSes of today that can run flash emulators.

[lossyalgo]

Assuming RAM and GPU prices come down again so that we can afford to buy our own hardware instead of running everything in the cloud, which forbids "nefarious" software. /s?

Edit: Steve from Gamer's Nexus basically agrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHO9UtvTPSA

[roywiggins]

Ruffle, the Flash runtime emulator, does run in the browser.