Accessing the History of the Web: A Web Way-Back Machine

摘要

One of the deficiencies of the World Wide Web is that the Web does not have a memory. Web resources always display one revision only, namely the latest one. In addition, once a Web resource moves from one location (i.e., URL) to another, the resource at the original location ceases to exist. Since the Web does not provide a mechanism to allow access to the revision history of resources, services like the Internet Archive have sprung into action to collect the history of important Web resources. The Web way-back machine described here, currently under development by the author, utilizes collections of historical Web resources like the ones provided by the Internet Archive to allow online, read-only access to the revisioned resources.