<story><title>18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated</title><url>http://www.fmboschetto.it/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danielbarla</author><text>&amp;gt; If you want something to last, don&amp;#x27;t base it on something that won&amp;#x27;t last.&lt;p&gt;and&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I guess what I&amp;#x27;m saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page.&lt;p&gt;While simplicity is a great way to future proof things, I&amp;#x27;m not convinced that this argument in general would work nearly as well without the benefit of hindsight. One could be forgiven for confusing it with &amp;quot;guess the future correctly&amp;quot;.  Plenty of relatively safe bets from 10, 20, 30 years ago haven&amp;#x27;t panned out that well. It&amp;#x27;s an interesting line of thinking though: exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived?</text></item><item><author>geocrasher</author><text>These simple sites show us something profound: If you want something to last, don&amp;#x27;t base it on something that won&amp;#x27;t last. There are a some technologies that will never allow somebody to build a site and leave it unchanged for 20 or 25 years. Cold Fusion comes to mind. Almost nobody hosts it anymore for one. Can you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25 years? The version of PHP it runs on will be EOL long before.&lt;p&gt;I guess what I&amp;#x27;m saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page.&lt;p&gt;Looks like Web 1.0 got something right after all :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bitexploder</author><text>My text files still work. I have MUD design documents from when I was in high school (mid to late 90s). Org mode and Markdown are kind of eternal formats. Even if all the tooling dies, they still look decent. Basic HTML still works well enough as well. You can write a parser for XML pretty easily. HTML can also be processed and rendered trivially. I think we could collectively find some other technologies that are likely to be around in another 20 years. The simpler the file format the more likely it is to be around :)&lt;p&gt;edit: A few more popped into my head. CSV. SQL schema + Data dumps (text format). The common theme to everything here is plain text. SQLite, although binary, is probably close to eternal. Git is eternal enough (recent HN post showed even POSIX shell is good enough to write a basic git client). JSON is easy to write a parser for as well. YAML.</text></comment>
<story><title>18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated</title><url>http://www.fmboschetto.it/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danielbarla</author><text>&amp;gt; If you want something to last, don&amp;#x27;t base it on something that won&amp;#x27;t last.&lt;p&gt;and&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I guess what I&amp;#x27;m saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page.&lt;p&gt;While simplicity is a great way to future proof things, I&amp;#x27;m not convinced that this argument in general would work nearly as well without the benefit of hindsight. One could be forgiven for confusing it with &amp;quot;guess the future correctly&amp;quot;.  Plenty of relatively safe bets from 10, 20, 30 years ago haven&amp;#x27;t panned out that well. It&amp;#x27;s an interesting line of thinking though: exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived?</text></item><item><author>geocrasher</author><text>These simple sites show us something profound: If you want something to last, don&amp;#x27;t base it on something that won&amp;#x27;t last. There are a some technologies that will never allow somebody to build a site and leave it unchanged for 20 or 25 years. Cold Fusion comes to mind. Almost nobody hosts it anymore for one. Can you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25 years? The version of PHP it runs on will be EOL long before.&lt;p&gt;I guess what I&amp;#x27;m saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page.&lt;p&gt;Looks like Web 1.0 got something right after all :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>untog</author><text>I think you can generalise the advice: remove as many processing steps as you can.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not so much that you needed to guess that HTML was going to be as long-lived as it is, it&amp;#x27;s that HTML is the final product that actually loads on the users computer, and those tend to stick around for a long time (or at least be emulated). The code that lives on a backend server somewhere, not so much.&lt;p&gt;For what it&amp;#x27;s worth, I don&amp;#x27;t think this example is necessarily bulletproof: it requires a working copy of Frontpage. If Microsoft behaved more like Apple it might have been deprecated away long ago!</text></comment>