Re: Firefox addin to replace 404 pages with archived pages from wayback machine

On 8 August 2016 at 17:02, Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com> wrote:

> Just to be clear, I said in my initial post that as long as the addin or
> feature was running at the user's request with clear indication of which
> content is from 404 pages, I don't think there's a violation of Web arch.
>
> My point was that: whether or not deleting pages (I.e. taking URIs that
> were 200 or 3XX and making them 404) is something we discourage on policy
> grounds, it's a supported and important part of Web arch. When I make a
> page 404 I usually have good reasons, and in general I expect users to see
> the page I return with the 404. I believe that's that the pertinent
> specifications call for, and should remain the default behavior of user
> agents.
>

Let's say a user has bookmarked a page for reference.  And that page has
moved, but is yet archived.  I can see value for a user to see the material
that she had seen before, from an archived version.

4xx is indicated to the user agent, and I think that fundamentally in web
arch the user is the ultimate curator of the content presented.


>
> Thank you.
>
> Noah
>
> On 8/5/2016 4:58 PM, Herbert Van de Sompel wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Aug 5, 2016 at 10:23 AM, Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com
>> <mailto:nrm@arcanedomain.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     See [1].
>>
>>     I thought this might be of some interest to the TAG. Seems to me that
>>     this is OK insofar as the addin is a modification to a user agent, and
>>     is presumably activated only with the user's consent.
>>
>>     Nonethess, this seems to embody a slightly skewed view of Web
>>     protocols: if I as a URI authority serve a new or updated page, your
>>     browser will do what I intend and show the user that new content. If I
>>     delete a page, the browser will not honor that deletion, but will show
>>     content anyway. This seems to me just a bit of a slippery slope. A 404
>>     is just as meaningful in Web protocols (no such page) as a 200 IMO.
>>
>>
>> The Memento Extension for Chrome (http://bit.ly/memento-for-chrome)
>> handles
>> 404 and much more. It covers archived resources in many web archives, see
>> http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/about/. And its behavior is completely
>> under control of the user because it works by right-clicking links or
>> pages.
>>
>> Right clicking yields a Memento menu with several options:
>> * Get near current date: Retrieves the most recently archived resource,
>> and
>> hence can be used to address 404.
>> * Get near saved date: retrieves an archived resource with archival
>> datetime closest to the date set in a calendar picker
>> * Get near memento-datetime: if the page is itself an archived resource in
>> a web archive, retrieves an archived resource of a linked resource with
>> archival datetime closest to the date expressed in the page's
>> Memento-Datetime header.
>> * Get near page date: retrieves an archived resource with a datetime
>> closest to the page datetime if it is provided in a machine-readable
>> manner
>> * Get near link date: retrieves an archived resource with a datetime
>> closest to date expressed in the data-versiondate link decoration
>> attribute, as defined in http://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/spec/
>>
>> Note that the Memento protocol is not only for web archives. It can also
>> be
>> supported by version control systems, wikis, etc. For example, the W3C
>> wiki
>> and all versions of the W3C specs are accessible using Memento. Using,
>> e.g.
>> Memento for Chrome, one can seamlessly navigate to the version of a wiki
>> page or W3C spec as it was at a certain date. And, of course to versions
>> of
>> linked resources, using right-click as described above. Using the Time
>> Travel API, see http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/guide/api/, one can use
>> a
>> URI of this form to get to a version of a W3C spec as it existed at a
>> given
>> date:
>> http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/memento/20031112/https://ww
>> w.w3.org/TR/webarch/
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Herbert
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>     I'm not proposing that the TAG do anything about this or devote
>>     significant time to it right now, just pointing it out in case it's of
>>     interest.
>>
>>     Thank you.
>>
>>     Noah
>>
>>
>>     [1]
>>     http://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/news/firefox-will-try-to-show-y
>> ou-saved-archive-of-a-page-instead-of-404-error-869482
>>     <http://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/news/firefox-will-try-to-show-
>> you-saved-archive-of-a-page-instead-of-404-error-869482>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Herbert Van de Sompel
>> Digital Library Research & Prototyping
>> Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library
>> http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/
>> http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0715-6126
>>
>> ==
>>
>
>