My blog posts contain lots of dead links which now point to the Internet Archive.
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Peter N. M. Hansteenreplied to Terence Eden last edited by
@Edent I have been refreshing some of my older pieces lately and have seen the same problem more often than I like.
I simply updated the URLs in my pieces but either of the logo options would be good to highlight the problem.
Back in the day we used to say that "good URLs do not change", but that seems to be of less importance to many at this point in time.
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Leaf Eriksen :pika:replied to Terence Eden last edited by
@Edent putting something like "archive – " at the start of a link never hurt anybody. Also, I don't think the IA's icon will help many people. I couldn't remember what it was until I looked it up, and I use their stuff all the time.
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@Edent I don't know what the best solution is, but I would consider how it will work for blind people with screen readers.
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@benjamingeer what, in your opinion, would be the best way to do that?
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This is what I've got so far. A scrap of CSS to append a small bit of text after any archive.org links.
Thoughts?
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@Edent why not append the link description in the HTML itself? That way it's both more accessible (unlike CSS text) and you are more flexible in how you render the snippet in future style changes.
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@jakob because I literally have thousands of links. I can't be arsed to go through all of them and manually add more HTML.
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@Edent I like the idea, but the superscript (archive) looks a bit big and clunky. Would it work / be not too much work to use a small svg of the Internet Archive icon instead? https://archive.org/offshoot_assets/assets/ia-logo-2c2c2c.03bd7e88c8814d63d0fcb35fc01f37c3.svg
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@billgoats possibly. A few people have mentioned that the logo isn't well recognised.
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@Edent Not bad, but I don’t understand the rationale behind the superscript.
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@Edent Alt text for the logo would be great of course.
But I read you didn't want to mess with the html. -
JeffersonBledsoereplied to Terence Eden last edited by
@Edent Do you need to make users aware individually for each link that it is an archive? Or is a warning at the start of a page that contains archived links enough?
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@mora in written English, it is usual to put some meta text in superscript. For example footnotes, ibid, etc.
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Terence Edenreplied to JeffersonBledsoe last edited by
@JeffersonBledsoe I find it helpful when scanning lots of links. Knowing that one out of dozen *might* be, is less useful.
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Matthewreplied to Terence Eden last edited by [email protected]
@Edent my only thought was that I think if I was reading this without knowing already, I’d assume that was two links, the main one and some archive one for some reason I didn’t know (I’d miss that there’s only one underline). Perhaps “archived link” and not sure the superscript makes it clearer
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@dracos good shout. I'll experiment.
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@dracos @Edent I think I'd have some kind of instant pop-over title that says "archived link" when you mouse over it, but that isn't very friendly for phones.
Perhaps a JS interstitial overlay that explains the website is now gone and allows you to click through to the archive?
Any kind of icon is going to require people to have context for the meaning, and any text is going to ruin the flow of your writing.
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@Edent I went with this icon on my personal corner of the internet Though reading through the comments in this thread it looks like this might not have been the best idea.
It's added via CSS :after. I'm feeling slightly less guilty as links have the added data elements per https://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/spec/ but clearly can do better from an accessibility standpoint.