You know what the coolest feature about the Web is?
(It's none of the things that have been added to it in the last 30 years.)
The coolest feature of the World Wide Web is that a fucking HTML page from like 1993 still renders perfectly fine today.
You know what the coolest feature about the Web is?
(It's none of the things that have been added to it in the last 30 years.)
The coolest feature of the World Wide Web is that a fucking HTML page from like 1993 still renders perfectly fine today.
@woo Those will all be supported to the end of time probably. For photo archiving I'd actually use a format like TIFF that is meant to do it losslessly and in a well-defined fashion.
@thomasfuchs I'm currently scanning monochrome photographic prints from the 1940s and trying to guess if JPEG, PNG or PDF will last longest :-/.
@seanddotmedotuk @tantramar @brucelawson The blink is actually from 1994, so is one of those newfangled extensions that got tacked on
@tantramar @thomasfuchs @brucelawson Renders perfectly fine. I.e. Doesn't blink.
@thomasfuchs @brucelawson <blink> 🙃
@thomasfuchs YES
@IversusAI This is the first web page ever made. Check out the source code. http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
@thomasfuchs
I'd love to see a live example.
@thomasfuchs and faster than any js-fueled lage coded on the last 10 years.
@thomasfuchs Weʼve recently been putting back pages we deleted in the late 1990s (when hosting plans had limited space) and theyʼre largely fine. Been fun to go down memory lane. If anything, the content is terrible (e.g. limited length because there were no mouse scroll wheels) but the tech is fine!
@jackyan scroll wheel became mass market in 1996 btw (Microsoft Intellimouse)
@mattl that’s amazing
@thomasfuchs Here's my fucking HTML page from 1994 served over HTTPS.
https://mat.tl/archive/1994.htm
I wrote it on a computer with 64kb RAM, stuck it on a floppy disk and uploaded it later. I edited it later a little to remove my old email address.
@thomasfuchs For now! Give it a few more years and you'll be required to reboot your device in insecure mode to use that filthy bare HTTP
@thomasfuchs A 30 year old HTML page may still render, but the Flash video it contained probably can't be played. I consider the removal of Flash (despite its security flaws) to be a kind of vandalism by Adobe.
@karlauerbach Flash was introduced in 1996 and had wide-spread support starting in maybe 1998/99
I just wish Mosaic worked with https pages as I demo'd it to my kids the other day and of course SSL hadn't been invented way back when
Actually
I want my Compuserve account back
@cloudguy you can use a proxy service for that, e.g. there’s stuff you can put on a raspberry pi and use with retrocomputers
@jbm @thomasfuchs I'm very old. Vinyl and CDs 'are my jam', as the hip cats say. I (my son actually) used MP3 then moved to FLAC on a Cowan player when FOSS picked it.
@woo @jbm For audio archiving I'd recommend FLAC or Apple Lossless (both are well documented open-source and royalty-free formats).
libavcodec supports both.
I think FLAC is more flexible with non-standard sample rates but in practice both codecs will work for basically anything you throw at it.
AIFF has been around in its current form since 1989...
@thomasfuchs Yeah but I thought that about sound files :-)
PNG is lossless but BIG.
@jbm @woo that’s fair, though I think on the scale of something like Apple they have to be super careful about patents etc too and they’re a some technical merits to the format (like embedding in MP4 containers)
Personally using both formats currently because widest compatibility (e.g. old iPod)
I'll forever resent and avoid using Apple Lossless (AKA ALAC), because it was transparently invented by Apple to mimic the functionality of the already-existing FLAC so that Apple-bundled software could store music in a technically comparable format yet not support the emerging losslessly-compressed PCM standard used by absolutely everyone but Apple, FLAC.
This was obviously done to make it painful for users habituated to using Apple's music software to buy music elsewhere.
I concur. I've been hesitating to post too voluminously about audio on a thread initially about the magic of the continued usefulness of old HTML pages, but since a few people have been welcoming my side-journey to audio format longevity...
Yes, I concur with @thomasfuchs about the usefulness of FLAC. It's unsurprisingly the format I've standardized on for PCM audio–offers a useful amount of compression while being lossless, includes good tagging support.
@ozamidas I hope they do.
@thomasfuchs a lot of #react and modern web developers would take offense at your statement.
@thomasfuchs and costs basically nothing to serve
@Cqoicebordel <blink> was introduced in 1994, so not an issue with a 1993 website :)
@thomasfuchs
To be fair, between the deprecation of <blink> and <frameset> and lots of others, that's not _exactly_ right.
But yeah, the fact that HTML is plain text and human readable make it even renderable by futur generations :)
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