Hyperlinks are a powerful tool for journalists and their readers. Diving deep into the context of an article is just a click away. But hyperlinks are a double-edged sword; for all of the internet’s boundlessness, what’s found on the Web can also be modified, moved, or entirely vanished. The fragility of the Web poses an […]
The Subversive Hyperlink
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
Disaster, doubt, and the origins of hypertext
Hypertext and the World Wide Web are built on a complex network of ideas that originate in the military and ecological disasters of the short 20 th Century, 1914--1989, and in a world-spanning intellectual effort to prevent their recurrence. Though that effort now appears to have failed, and though the tragic story of the 20 th Century has not, it seems, concluded, we may learn profit by examining the concepts and ideals on which hypertext was built.
On Link Rot
The web suffers from link rot: hyperlinks that were valid upon creation will often point into nothingness after some time has passed. Within the framework of the web, the typical solution is to link to a snapshot of the original page, hosted on archive.org.
Research, Attention, and Manipulation
Questionable articles can quietly move into Wikipedia and news outlets without notice.
No Longer No Sense of an Ending
This is my first feature piece on Contents Magazine, about harnessing the properties of hypertext and the Web for superior reader experiences and business results.
The Mediated Web
<p>Large Language Models have the potential to hugely shift what it means to interact with a web browser.</p> <p>Here’s a prediction: the web will soon be mediated by agents, not just rendered by web browsers. Every user will have their own AI interpreting information for them, and executing tasks on their behalf.</p> <p>What does this mean now, and what does it mean for the future of the web? Let’s delve into what a mediated web might look like, and how it could impact the internet ecosystem.</p>
Vision and Reality of Hypertext and GUIs: 2.1.13 Microcosm @mprove
Microcosm (cf. 2.1.13) is a research project at the University of Southampton. Like Intermedia five years before, Microcosm is designed around the idea that material of diverse sources and formats should be tied together into one hypertext. To achieve this goal links have to be separated from the documents. They are stored and maintained in special link databases. In contrast to Intermedia, Microcosm plays the active role in gathering the necessary data out of the documents. For each topic it stores data on which documents contain information about it and also where inside the documents the information is located. This elaborated conception of links can be seen more as a kind of Memex’ trails than simple one-to-one links. Given this structure dynamic linking becomes possible. This means that links can be associated with generic text strings. Wherever this string shows up a link is placed automatically. This has the effect that documents that are imported for the first time into Microcosm can have links immediately.
Funding The Web: A Wise Choice
The Web is slow-motion collapsing for multiple reasons, but at the heart of it all is a little known system: the Search/Browser Levy. Let's fix it!
The 49MB Web Page
A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.
The Sites of The Useless Web
The current roster of useless websites on The Useless Web — with the story behind each one.
Google News Is Boosting Garbage AI-Generated Articles
404 Media reviewed multiple examples of AI rip-offs making their way into Google News. Google said it doesn't focus on how an article was produced—by an AI or human—opening the way for more AI-generated articles.
Google’s broken link to the web
With AI search results coming to the masses, the human-powered web recedes further into the background
My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet
Slowly but surely, huge swaths of the internet are vanishing. But the artefacts of the early web are still out there, and they have lessons for the future.
Solutions for Link Rot on the Modern Web
Web links are fundamental to the web, enabling navigation between pages and citations in research articles. However, web links suffer from "link rot", a phenomenon in which links are likely to become inaccessible over time. This can occur if a link’s site disappears, making it impossible to resolve the hostname or establish a server connection, or the linked page has been deleted, resulting in an HTTP 404 "Not Found" error. Today, a common solution to tackle link rot is to rely on web archives, which capture snapshots of web pages for future reference. However, the modern web has evolved significantly since web archives were first introduced, leading to several limitations in their effectiveness. First, the scale of the web has grown tremendously, making it infeasible to crawl every page whenever it changes. As a result, many broken links either have no archived copies, or the archived copies have stale content. Second, modern web pages rely heavily on increasingly complex and diverse JavaScript. This shift has made it more challenging for preserving fidelity in archived copies, significantly increasing both the computational cost of operating browser-based crawlers and engineering effort required to maintain accurate replay systems. This thesis presents a set of solutions to cope with link rot on the modern web. My work aims to mitigate the various limitations of web archives. First, for broken links without any archived copy, or if the archived copy includes stale content or unavailable functionalities, I built Fable. Fable revives the dead link with the new URL to the same page whenever available. Compared to prior approaches, Fable revives 4.6K broken links—a 50% increase—with much higher accuracy. Second, for pages that require dynamic crawling, I show how web archives can achieve a better tradeoff between efficiency and fidelity. By carefully choosing 8.9% of pages to crawl dynamically and strategically reusing resources from those crawls, an archive can serve 99% of the remaining statically crawled pages without any fidelity loss. Third, for fidelity violations in archived copies that are caused by incorrect edits to crawled scripts, I built FidEx. FidEx reliably detects when an archived page differs from its original version and pinpoints the root cause. After fixing the most common errors pinpointed by FidEx, I reduced the fraction of pages for which FidEx reports a violation of fidelity from 15% to 9%.
Solutions for Link Rot on the Modern Web
Web links are fundamental to the web, enabling navigation between pages and citations in research articles. However, web links suffer from "link rot", a phenomenon in which links are likely to become inaccessible over time. This can occur if a link’s site disappears, making it impossible to resolve the hostname or establish a server connection, or the linked page has been deleted, resulting in an HTTP 404 "Not Found" error. Today, a common solution to tackle link rot is to rely on web archives, which capture snapshots of web pages for future reference. However, the modern web has evolved significantly since web archives were first introduced, leading to several limitations in their effectiveness. First, the scale of the web has grown tremendously, making it infeasible to crawl every page whenever it changes. As a result, many broken links either have no archived copies, or the archived copies have stale content. Second, modern web pages rely heavily on increasingly complex and diverse JavaScript. This shift has made it more challenging for preserving fidelity in archived copies, significantly increasing both the computational cost of operating browser-based crawlers and engineering effort required to maintain accurate replay systems. This thesis presents a set of solutions to cope with link rot on the modern web. My work aims to mitigate the various limitations of web archives. First, for broken links without any archived copy, or if the archived copy includes stale content or unavailable functionalities, I built Fable. Fable revives the dead link with the new URL to the same page whenever available. Compared to prior approaches, Fable revives 4.6K broken links—a 50% increase—with much higher accuracy. Second, for pages that require dynamic crawling, I show how web archives can achieve a better tradeoff between efficiency and fidelity. By carefully choosing 8.9% of pages to crawl dynamically and strategically reusing resources from those crawls, an archive can serve 99% of the remaining statically crawled pages without any fidelity loss. Third, for fidelity violations in archived copies that are caused by incorrect edits to crawled scripts, I built FidEx. FidEx reliably detects when an archived page differs from its original version and pinpoints the root cause. After fixing the most common errors pinpointed by FidEx, I reduced the fraction of pages for which FidEx reports a violation of fidelity from 15% to 9%.
