This is a must read from start to finish. Here are a few snippets to wet you whistle.
Bookmarking a page takes you to its current version – but earlier ones are harder to find (to see an award-winning 1990s incarnation of newscientist.com, see our gallery of web pages past, right). One option is to visit a resource like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. There, you key in the URL of the site you want and are confronted with a matrix of years and dates for old pages that have been cached.
It's a lot of hassle. But it shoudn't be, says Herbert Van de Sompel, a computer scientist at Los Alamos. "Today we treat the web like a library in which you have to know how to go and search for things. We've a better way."
That "better way" is a system that gives browsers a "time-travel" mode, allowing users to find web pages from particular dates and times without having to navigate through archives.
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"In addition to language and media type, we negotiate in time. So Memento asks the server not for today's version of this page, but how it looked one year ago, for instance," says Van de Sompel.
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Jakob Voss, a developer with the Common Library Network in Göttingen, Germany, is an early Memento user – and he is already advocating use of Memento for sites with frequently updated pages like Wikipedia.
"Memento is only a proof of concept but it looks very promising and could be a great enhancement to the web. There is little support in today's browsers for digging into archives, especially those with dynamic content management systems like wikis and weblogs," Voss says.
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