MIT has a set of books labelled "Open Access" but it's a little clunky to find them on the MIT Press site, and so I've gone ahead and mirrored 400+ of them here:
did it really need to require a browser with javascript enabled with permission to run arbitrary code in it to show anything whatsoever, without any graceful degradation? that's so inaccessible, and it makes it unusable to me and others like me :-(
@lxo technically, all websites allow the execution of arbitrary code and a browser. Anyway, there is a command line interface to the archive if you want to use it. It's how I do 99% of my work.
there are accessible browsers that don't support javascript, and there are various sound reasons to not want arbitrary javascript to run on one's computer, for freedom, security, ecology and whatnot. good engineering and w3c standards recommend graceful degradation in these cases. but really, was there strong reason to mandate javascript for that page? that seems surprising and unlikely to me.
you got me interested in the cli, I'd never heard of that. thanks, I've read the docs at https://archive.org/developers/internetarchive/cli.html and installed the program from the Trisquel repo, but I can't see how to use it to find out what's available from that web page that I can't see. any more specific pointers you'd be willing to share?
@lxo IA web client does try to fall back to simpler version. When executing wget -O- 2>/dev/null https://archive.org/details/mit_press_open_access the output contains the following, among other things:
<h2>Redirecting you to a lite version of archive.org...</h2></div><meta http-equiv="refresh" data-owner="nginx" content="0; url=/details/mit_press_open_access?noscript=true"></noscript>
@textfiles@lxo It used to be not very easy to access files at archive.org w/o JS before, but it'd work. In-browser viewing required JS, but it would load a page with at least links to browse all files, and IIRC that provided direct links (perhaps with a redirect in the middle, but something one could feed e.g. wget).
@textfiles@lxo But now I'm getting the redirect to "a lite version" as soon as I follow the link to the description page. This redirect, in my experience, has never worked over the years, but wasn't on this part of archive.org, and now it redirects to a 404 message.