Pretty Persistent IDentifiers (PPID)

An article, posted 9 months ago filed in pid, links, isbn, science, archive, url, uri, web & semantic.

In archives it helps to have PIDs: Persistent IDentifiers. PIDs help organisations attribute data to consistently identified objects. There are many PID-schemes. Books can be persistently identified by their ISBN. In science, DOIs are popular to identify scientific articles. And there are plenty of other persistent identifiers.

What most of them share is the following: they need registration. And while that could be a good thing, I've seen well meant attempts at creating a PID where the central entity went rogue, links are dependent on some centralised resolver and it all falls apart.

The requirements

When I was tasked to create a long lasting QR label the requirements were clear:

• The basis had to be a URL (QR Codes can contain anything, but URLs deliver the best UX)
• It should have a fallback: the URL should not be a meaningless string; it should at least contain an identifier it was once assigned; in the …

Introducing Web Page Archiver (new ruby gem)

An article, posted almost 13 years ago filed in html, website, ruby, gem, archive, web page archiver, base64, data uri, mhtml, mime html, rubygems by murb & open source.

To the ruby-folks (ruby is a programming language). Just a quick note to inform you that I've coded a new ruby gem:

> Web page archiver is a gem for creating web page archives: single files that contain images, Javascript, CSS, and the actual HTML. Of course you may zip these files, but there is hardly any support for opening and viewing such files without first requiring the user to extract the files before viewing. The solution offered in this gem is either MHTML or HTML with no external references. MHTML (or MIME HTML) is the default archive format for Internet Explorer and Opera, and can also be read in these browsers. HTML with no external references is not written by any browser as a standard archive format (that I know of) but can be read by any browser, as long as it has support for the Data URI-scheme (all modern browsers, although size limits apply to IE8).

More on the Web Page Archiver github page.