Strategies for Abandoned Web sites

Mozilla seems to have adopted a strategy for archiving Web sites which are "abandoned" [1]

   * Identify sites that had been abandoned, no longer 
     fit the Mozilla mission, or had serious security 
     or privacy concerns.
   * Determine a way to retire each site or remedy the 
     expressed concerns.
   * Ensure that the site’s purpose within the history 
     of the Mozilla mission was preserved.

And they created a Mozilla Web site archive [2]


# Why do I share this?

I have seen different strategies around the Web in my different places of work. 

* W3C is using a lot the notion of unique identifiers (through a dated space) to make it easier to manage the legacy
* Most of Web sites done by Web agencies are at a regular pace completely destroyed and remade new with the same domain name without considering the URI legacy.
* Some sites exist for only a couple of years. Think about all these movies Web sites. 
* And here there is another proposal with Mozilla, which is kind of shelved Web site (aka managing somehow your own http://archive.org/ )  


It also reminds me of the recent proposal: HTTP framework for time-based access to resource states -- Memento [3]


[1] http://blog.mozilla.com/webdev/2011/01/05/mozilla-website-archive/
[2] http://blog.mozilla.com/website-archive/
[3] http://mementoweb.org/guide/rfc/ID/


-- 
Karl Dubost - http://dev.opera.com/
Developer Relations & Tools, Opera Software

Received on Tuesday, 11 January 2011 21:21:45 UTC