As web technologies evolve, web archivists work to keep up so that our
digital history is preserved. Recent advances in web technologies have
introduced client-side executed scripts that load data without a referential
identifier or that require user interaction (e.g., content loading when the
page has scrolled). These advances have made automating methods for capturing
web pages more difficult. Because of the evolving schemes of publishing web
pages along with the progressive capability of web preservation tools, the
archivability of pages on the web has varied over time. In this paper we show
that the archivability of a web page can be deduced from the type of page being
archived, which aligns with that page's accessibility in respect to dynamic
content. We show concrete examples of when these technologies were introduced
by referencing mementos of pages that have persisted through a long evolution
of available technologies. Identifying these reasons for the inability of these
web pages to be archived in the past in respect to accessibility serves as a
guide for ensuring that content that has longevity is published using good
practice methods that make it available for preservation.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL)
2013, Valletta, Malt
