Archive.org should be nothing but full-length screenshots
Archive.org is great, but there are so many sites it flubs because of CSS tricks, broken images, etc. that it’ll never be the resource it could, and needs to, be. Especially if — thinking ahead 50 years — it’s billions of saved pages are useless because browsers no longer parse HTML that old.
That’s why we need an Archive.org that only takes full length screenshots of a site’s homepage. And just once a month, not whenever the site updates like Archive.org does. This way you could quickly flip through a site’s entire visual history, preserved forever in screenshots. It’d be the ultimate in design inspiration, reference and web history with an idea as simple as “a site full of dated screenshots”.
A couple of weeks back this was going to be the new side project I pursued — but after trying to get my head around everything it’d entail I shelved it. I still think it has the potential to be extremely successful, I just can’t get it started on my own. And projects I can’t at least get started on my own I tend to shy away from.
Tags: archive, idea, screenshots
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[...] Howell hit’s it right on the nose with his latest post. Archive.org’s Wayback machine should store full page images instead of HTML code. So many [...]
the hamstu » The Problem with Archive.org — Tue, Nov 6, 2007