Supporting Web Archiving via Web Packaging by Sawood Alam, Michele C Weigle, Michael L Nelson, Martin Klein, and Herbert Van de Sompel is their position paper for the Internet Architecture Board's ESCAPE workshop (
Exploring Synergy between Content Aggregation and the Publisher Ecosystem). It describes the considerable potential importance of Web Packaging, the topic of the workshop, for Web archiving, but also the problems it poses because, like the Web before
Memento, it ignores the time dimension.
Despite living in the heart of Silicon Valley, our home Internet connection is 3M/1Mbit DSL from
Sonic; we love our ISP and I refuse to do business with AT&T or Comcast. As you can imagine, the speed with which Web pages load has been a topic of particular interest for this blog, for example
here and
here. (which starts from a laugh-out-loud,
must-read post from Maciej Cegłowski).
Then, three years ago, Frederic Filloux's
Bloated HTML, the best and the worse triggered my rant
Fighting the Web Flab:
Filloux continues:
In due fairness, this cataract of code loads very fast on a normal connection.
His "normal" connection must be much faster than my home's 3Mbit/s DSL. But then the hope kicks in:
The Guardian technical team was also the first one to devise a solid implementation of Google's new Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) format. In doing so, it eliminated more than 80% of the original code, making it blazingly fast on a mobile device.
Great, but AMP is still 20 bytes of crud for each byte of content. What's the word for 20 times faster than "blazingly"?
Web Packaging is a response to:
In recent years, a number of proprietary formats have been defined to enable aggregators of news and other articles to republish Web resources; for example, Google’s AMP, Facebook’s Instant Articles, Baidu’s MIP, and Apple’s News Format.
Below the fold I look into the history that got us to this point, and where we may be going.
