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Comment by zbendefy

1 day ago

Tangential, but Flash had a nice side effect that the "app" could be exported in a self contained way via SWF.

Exporting this site for example in a future proof way is not that obvious. (Exporting as pdf wont work with the webgl applets, exporting the html page might work but is error prone depending in the website structure)

50 years from now, flash emulators will still work on swf files, but these sites might be lost. Or is there a way to archive sites like this?

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zbendefy

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pava0  12 hours ago

I strongly suggest you try (the selfhosted version of) Browsertrix from Webrecorder, it's really well done, actively delevoped and can export the website as .wacz without problem.

KPGv2  1 day ago

> Or is there a way to archive sites like this?

A couple days ago, someone published their archive of HN that works in any browser.

Archiving sites is easy anyway. I wrote a Scrapy app that archives everything within the a specific fandom on Ao3. TH hardest part is remembering how beautiful soup queries work.

  • roywiggins  1 day ago

    Static sites are straightforward, yeah. Highly dynamic websites like this one commonly explode when you archive them naively.

KPGv2  21 hours ago

> 50 years from now, flash emulators will still work on swf files

I'm not sure 50 years from now there will be flash emulators. Who is going to write on for the XP3.12345235 Fruity Ununpentium Silicon x256^2 neuralink devices.

Didn't Flash die because iPhones weren't going to support it? So one of the major OSes people spend most of their lives on can't even run SFW files. Can Android? I've honestly never tried.

But web standards persist.