HTTP Framework for Time-Based Access to Resource States: Memento
Herbert Van de Sompel, Michael Nelson, Robert Sanderson; IETF I-D
Representatives of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Old Dominion
University have published a first IETF Working Draft of HTTP Framework
for Time-Based Access to Resource States: Memento. According to the
editor's iMinds blog: "While the days of human time travel as described
in many a science fiction novel are yet to come, time travel on the Web
has recently become a reality thanks to the Memento project. In essence,
Memento adds a time dimension to the Web: enter the Web address of a
resource in your browser and set a time slider to a desired moment in
the Web's past, and see what the resource looked like around that time...
Technically, Memento achieves this by: (a) Leveraging systems that host
archival Web content, including Web archives, content management systems,
and software versioning systems; (b) Extending the Web's most commonly
used protocol (HTTP) with the capability to specify a datetime in
protocol requests, and by applying an existing HTTP capability (content
negotiation) in a new dimension: 'time'. The result is a Web in which
navigating the past is as seamless as navigating the present...
The Memento concepts have attracted significant international attention
since they were first published in November 2009, and compliant tools
are already emerging. For example, at the client side there is the
MementoFox add-on for FireFox, and a Memento app for Android; at the
server side, there is a plug-in for MediaWiki servers, and the Wayback
software that is widely used by Web archives, worldwide, was recently
enhanced with Memento support..."
Lots of new tricks to learn on sites using MediaWiki as folks update their installations, I'm not a big fan of programs written in PHP and Javascript, but they're impossible to avoid on the Web. So is MediaWiki, so any real improvements help.