I am sorry for the delay. I am dealing with a family crisis and will be for some time to
come.
The Archives was set up at a time when CC's were limited to 1 MB of space. Brian
Leverich offered us 1 GB (remember this was 1996 and hard drives were expensive) for the
Archives.
Many schools and libraries were locked into using a browser called Lynx (text based).
I had been transcribing and translating Russian church records and mailing them to a
computer science professor at VA Tech who was putting them online in text format.
We started the Archives using his text based format.
We are continuing to use text because:
1. It is efficient. I have taken a 500kb html file and reduced it to 5kb without losing
the data. Remember that a lot of folks are still using dial-up.
2. Hackers cannot put JavaScript into the files to spread a virus.
3. Visitors can easily cut and paste information into their genealogy program without
having to edit out a bunch of html tags.
4. HTML is an evolving language. Many early tags have been deprecated; some still work but
later browsers many not support them. I do not want to have to edit 2 million files to
update the html tags. Text will still be as readable in the 22nd century as it was in the
20th century.
If your CC insists on deep linking to the text files, he/she should add a notation to the
link reminding the visitor to use the back button on the browser to get back.
A better solution would be to link to the Table of Contents for the Archives which is an
html file.
Sent from my iPad
On Aug 21, 2016, at 10:05 PM, JFlorian <cageycat(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Laverne,
But my point is, there is no webmaster 'here' who can answer about or for
the Archives! Here is here; there is there. If you want to invite the
folks from 'there' to the discussion, fine. But we--here-- do not have the
information about there.
Also, their practices have been Good Enough all these years. Why bother
fussing over it now?
Plus, as I pointed out, the Archives is set up differently, to (a) allow
submitters a format in which they can independently submit files (b) in the
format of text-only files to save on bandwidth and server space. I don't
think "we" can or should dictate to them "You must make pages look like
webpages" because "a webpage" can simply hold text (as they are doing),
and
second, do any of us plan to sponsor or underwrite their expenses?? No.
So leave it be.
Btw, I have no vested interest in the Archives. I do not know the people.
But this seems a royal waste of time and energy over something that none of
us here can change or fix.
A better course of action would be for Denise to email them privately to
open discussions IF even necessary. Just ''us' here hashing it out is not
worth our breaths, IMO.
Let's talk about how to recruit new CCs.
Judy
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