From the title I thought this was about taking trips down memory lane or seeing historical posts by others. But it seems to be more about seeing design (rather than content) from one's own site in years past. I hope I'm not the only one who would prefer not to see my embarrassing old designs and rather see my archive content rendered in the current (least cringe) template.
is there an decentralized org to ensure that all of the js css we use today remain backward compatible decades from now? or are we just at the whim of these browser vendors?
And if it couldn't, you could run these old programs in a VM, and I expect that to continue essentially forever, so I see no future problem viewings these browser files.
My initial thought was that the title was referring to web archive services like the Wayback Machine or archive.is , but the actual topic was equally relevant. I think time travel should work as long as all content is archived / checked in: no reliance on external services (is this the definition of "static site"?)
I don't get this? I can checkout an old commit of my dynamic server rendered blog written in go and do the same thing.
Sure I won't have the actual content, but I can see the pages and designs with dummy data. But then I can also load up one of several backups of the sqlite file and most likely everything will still work.
interesting idea: a browser plugin that will cache and upload the final html/css of a page, with some logic to avoid duplicates and “extras” it could be a client side distributed archival system that captures the historical web in always static content
I dunno -- generally speaking, the Wayback Machine is a much better time travel experience than trying to recover a website from an old git commit.
Especially since it's not limited to only sites I've created...
And in this particular case, all the creator was looking for was old badge images, and they'd generally be in an images directory somewhere no matter whether the site was static or dynamic.
I have a bit of an internal struggle here. I use a site generator too but I struggle with the question, should I? I recently wrote about why I’m writing pure html and CSS in 2025.
If it builds. Author mentions he/she uses Eleventy, so there's always a possibility that current node / npm versions won't work with some ancient dependencies or with old style peer dependencies. Then it's a long bisection with nvm until you get the right version combo.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 36.6 ms ] threadAnd if it couldn't, you could run these old programs in a VM, and I expect that to continue essentially forever, so I see no future problem viewings these browser files.
1: https://hamatti.org/posts/i-gamified-my-own-blog/
2: https://varunbarad.com/blog/blogging-achievements
Sure I won't have the actual content, but I can see the pages and designs with dummy data. But then I can also load up one of several backups of the sqlite file and most likely everything will still work.
Especially since it's not limited to only sites I've created...
And in this particular case, all the creator was looking for was old badge images, and they'd generally be in an images directory somewhere no matter whether the site was static or dynamic.
https://joeldare.com/why-im-writing-pure-html-and-css-in-202...
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-08-31
(available via 'past' in the topbar)
I almost ended up doing it twice. Old links and time is what stops me.
Inspiration - https://ankarstrom.se/~john/articles/html/