The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search.
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
The "www" browser still compiles without errors today along with an assortment of other utilties. I use these with a TLS forward proxy
I use the W3C programs to retrieve HTML but not to view it. For reading HTML I use a contemporary text-only browser
"www" is a 671.0K static binary for me
I'm a text-only browser user for 30+ years so I'm probably biased in favor of text. I routinely save HTML pages from webites I find useful, almost always as plain text. No resources. This makes sesnse for me because plain text is how I search and consume information. Firefox and other popular browsers generally do not save pages as plain text, they have always attempted to save as HTML along with page resources. But I'm not interested in images, fonts, CSS, Javascript, etc. Today I notice some people writing headlless browsers, like h5i, now output pages as markdown or some "machine-readable" format
econ · · focus · HN ↗
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
1vuio0pswjnm7 · · focus · HN ↗
The earlier CERN, later W3C, LineMode browser, named "www", also kept a full text history by default
Each website gets a separate folder, e.g., "308" in the example below
An .index file contains a log of all requested URLs with timestamps
Pages are cached in temp files, e.g., HTTP response headers are stored in .meta files The "www" browser still compiles without errors today along with an assortment of other utilties. I use these with a TLS forward proxyI use the W3C programs to retrieve HTML but not to view it. For reading HTML I use a contemporary text-only browser
"www" is a 671.0K static binary for me
I'm a text-only browser user for 30+ years so I'm probably biased in favor of text. I routinely save HTML pages from webites I find useful, almost always as plain text. No resources. This makes sesnse for me because plain text is how I search and consume information. Firefox and other popular browsers generally do not save pages as plain text, they have always attempted to save as HTML along with page resources. But I'm not interested in images, fonts, CSS, Javascript, etc. Today I notice some people writing headlless browsers, like h5i, now output pages as markdown or some "machine-readable" format
1vuio0pswjnm7 · · focus · HN ↗
*websites
For example,
Neither Firefox or Vivaldi on Android has an option to save pages, only to print them to PDF
Saving can be achieved in these graphical browsers, e.g., through intents ("share"), but this requires other apps
Look at the commands offered in a "web browser" in 1991-1993
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240205003557if_/https://www.w3.org/LineMode/User/Commands.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20240205003557if_/https://www.w3...