One thing of interest as you look through the pages is that in some pages there are now white space holes in the pages that have started to show up. This is because the pages are archives of the code and resources rather than images of the page. Some areas of the page that are filled with complex dynamic data or video/rich media resources from offsite cause problems for the software when it tries to capture moments in time or when the developer “shuts down” the code. This sort of thing is a difficult obstacle for many of the archiving solutions out there.

As someone who cares about the history of journalism on the Web, this problem worries me. Citizens looking back in 50 years will be able to see screen captures of hundreds of newspaper pages documenting the event, but their knowledge of our online experience will be incomplete. We could capture screen images, but that won’t allow an understanding of the actual experience.

If you’re a developer preparing this kind of dynamic content for a special project on your site, please give some thought to how you will provide an archival copy of the software and data.