I love this by Dave Winer
I’ve been writing about future-safe archives for many years, a way to put down $10K or so, and guarantee best efforts to keep my web presence going long after my death. But I expected it would be implemented by a long-lived university with the help of an insurance company, which is by definition a long-lived entity. It’s good that Automattic is thinking about this (there is no published plan, so far just an idea), maybe they’ll seek a partnership with Harvard or Oxford, or Lloyds of London. #
and this
- I’ve been watching the rollout of Automattic’s proposed 100-year websites program. It’s the first time I think I’ve seen my friend Matt personally roll something out like this, and I’m glad he’s doing it, esp in this area because it lets us have an open discussion about the kind of web we want for the future. #
- I wish instead of offering WordPress as a hedge against standards that change, he put his bet down the other way, by creating static renderings of the WordPress sites, and offering his services to people who use other CMSes, and saying these sites will still be here in 100 years, and thereby challenge the browser-makers of 2123 to be able to read those sites as well then as browsers could read them in 1993 and 2023. #
- I think ultimately it’ll be a better business move, because standards that move based on the will of big companies never move compatibly. The interop we have with the web wasn’t created by Googles or Mozillas or the EFF. The web was created by accident, when the tech industry of the early 1990s wasn’t looking. And of course they’ve been trying ever since to dismantle the interop gift we got from the accidental network.