Article tag · 50 matching pages
Dead Internet Theory: Why content assembled in the browser arrives too late for many crawlers, so archives store a page skeleton instead of the page — and what running a real browser does and does not recover.
Dead Internet Theory: Public web archives capture what an anonymous visitor can read, so anything behind a login quietly sits outside the record. The Yahoo Groups shutdown shows how a twenty-year archive of communities escaped public capture, and how authorized members saved what they could.
Dead Internet Theory: Records that live behind search forms have no links for crawlers to follow, so most web archives overlook them. This article explains how form-driven databases get lost — the Haddon catalogue is the documented case — and why exports and static pages preserve them where crawls cannot.
Dead Internet Theory: Streaming audio and video is not a file a crawler can copy, so page-level archives save the player and miss the stream. The British Library's One & Other case shows what was lost, what survived, and what a complete capture has to include.
Dead Internet Theory: How robots.txt, a file written for search-engine crawlers, has decided which pages get archived and which stored captures can be seen, and what a missing capture actually does and does not prove.
Dead Internet Theory: Why the CAPTCHAs and browser checks that keep scrapers off sites also keep preservation crawlers out, what those barriers leave uncaptured, and how authorized access can still save material without dismantling the defenses.
Dead Internet Theory: Many pages are built separately for each visitor, so one URL can stand for dozens of different versions. A web archive captures only the version its anonymous crawler happened to get, and reading that capture later takes context the archive does not store.
Dead Internet Theory: Web servers decide what to send based on where a request comes from, and crawlers are requests too. That leaves archives crawling from a single country with a lopsided record of the web, which national archives and regional captures only partly repair.
Dead Internet Theory: A file can keep answering at its address long after the links and index entries pointing to it vanish. This explains how pages end up reachable by a known URL but absent from every index, and what records still lead back to them.
Dead Internet Theory: Why a saved page can open blank, broken, or behind an error wall even though it was captured, and how to tell a replay failure from a real archive gap.
Dead Internet Theory: Why switching forum software can invalidate every post address, what broken permalinks cost readers and contributors, and how ID mapping and redirects keep the links alive.
Dead Internet Theory: A site migration can preserve the current page while quietly erasing the older versions that explain how the page changed over time.
Dead Internet Theory: A cloud document can function like a public webpage until its owner deletes it, loses the account, or changes sharing permissions.
Dead Internet Theory: A software repository is more than its latest ZIP file, and a hosting shutdown can erase the history around code even when the code itself survives.
Dead Internet Theory: An old project may have all of its source code intact and still become impossible to rebuild when one dependency disappears from a package registry.
Dead Internet Theory: Old hardware may remain physically repairable while becoming digitally stranded because the exact firmware needed to recover it is no longer available.
Dead Internet Theory: Source code can show that an old API existed, but without its reference documentation developers may lose the rules needed to understand or reproduce its behavior.
Dead Internet Theory: Government websites are reorganized whenever administrations, agencies, and publishing systems change, and older publications can become difficult to distinguish from genuinely deleted material.
Dead Internet Theory: When a local newspaper closes, the loss is not only future reporting; decades of past reporting can become difficult to search, cite, or retrieve.
Dead Internet Theory: A public database can lose fields, attachments, searchability, or historical context during replacement even when nobody intended to delete a record.