RE: Strategies for Abandoned Web sites

Why are web sites abandoned? Because the person or organization
cannot or does not want to maintain it any more. Any approach to
this problem has to take into account the economics: who pays
for perpetual care?

http://www.archive.org/post/337580/internet-archive-needs-your-help

counting on the organization that originally posted the material
to maintain perpetual care doesn't address most of the cases where
"stuff goes away":

(see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009Mar/0057.html

and followup from JAR).

This problem that hasn't gone away yet (but it's only been 12 years):
http://larry.masinter.net/9909-twist.pdf


Note recent
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-masinter-dated-uri

 which reintroduced "duri" as well as "tdb".

Larry
--
http://larry.masinter.net



-----Original Message-----
From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Karl Dubost
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 1:21 PM
To: www-tag@w3.org WG
Subject: 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 Thursday, 20 January 2011 16:38:46 UTC