Re: Firefox addin to replace 404 pages with archived pages from wayback machine

On August 17, 2016 at 12:31:40 AM, Noah Mendelsohn ([email protected]) wrote:
> > 4xx is indicated to the user agent, and I think that fundamentally in web arch the user
> is the ultimate curator of the content presented.
>
> Yes, as I acknowledged in my post, but from a protocol point of view 404
> means "doesn't exist" (Not found). If there's a real need for "Not found,
> but please offer users an old version if available" I would think a new 40X
> code would be the more architecturally robust way of giving the server
> control.


Perhaps, but that would take years to roll out - also, if it's moved,
then 301 or 307 (or 200 OK, with "we trashed this page, gasp!"). If a
user wants to find a 404 page, then they can manually go to a Web
Archive to find the page.

The Firefox extension is just helping with that step: the point is to
revive the page despite (in spite of?) what the server wants - the
extension and the user don't care and are in fact, directly trying to
subvert the server on purpose (by design).

Thus, it seems like a waste of time to work around this with new
codes, when the old ones are suitable - and it would just start a
small arms race against web archives and extensions that facilitate
finding lost content.