Again on permanent webpages

[faendryl]

I'm not too familiar with HTTP headers and the like, but I suspect that there ought to be somewhere (heck, it could be in the page source) to pass a "permanence" tag. Providers or other intermediaries which perform any form of caching could read these tags and permanently cache the page (i.e., never request it again). Still, what if someone did

Comments

[holmes_iv]

Yeah, I think that pretty much covers it. The standard workaround for this is time-based mirror sites (the Wayback Machine, generally), but it's definitely a hack. And I'm not entirely sure that changing the structure of the net beyond recognition would help. Digital signatures might, though (even a decent protocol to keep around an MD5 hash of the page content and the original timestamp, or some such tricksyness). Still, it'd be a stretch to get people to want to bother, with things set up as they are currently.