Content negotiation and Memento

Back in March Ilya Kreymer summarized discussions he and I had had about a problem he'd encountered building oldweb.today thus:

a key problem with Memento is that, in its current form, an archive can return an arbitrarily transformed object and there is no way to determine what that transformation is. In practice, this makes interoperability quite difficult.

What Ilya was referring to was that, for a given Web page, some archives have preserved the HTML, the images, the CSS and so on, whereas some have preserved a PNG image of the page (transforming it by taking a screenshot). Herbert van de Sompel, Michael Nelson and others have come up with a creative solution. Details below the fold.

The Architecture of Emulation on the Web

In the program my talk at the IIPC's 2016 General Assembly in Reykjavík was entitled Emulation & Virtualization as Preservation Strategies. But after a meeting to review my report called by the Mellon Foundation I changed the title to The Architecture of Emulation on the Web. Below the fold, an edited text of the talk with an explanation for the change, and links to the sources.