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To Re-experience the Web: A Framework for the Transformation and Replay of Archived Web Pages
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

To Re-experience the Web: A Framework for the Transformation and Replay of Archived Web Pages

John Berlin, Mat Kelly, Michael L. Nelson and Michele C. Weigle
ACM transactions on the web, v 17(4), 28
30 Nov 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3589206
url
https://doi.org/10.1145/3589206View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

Digital libraries and archives Information systems World Wide Web
When replaying an archived web page, or memento, the fundamental expectation is that the page should be viewable and function exactly as it did at the archival time. However, this expectation requires web archives upon replay to modify the page and its embedded resources so that all resources and links reference the archive rather than the original server. Although these modifications necessarily change the state of the representation, it is understood that without them the replay of mementos from the archive would not be possible. The process of replaying mementos and the modifications made to the representations by web archives varies between archives. Because of this, there is no standard terminology for describing the replay and needed modifications. In this article, we propose terminology for describing the existing styles of replay and the modifications made on the part of web archives to mementos to facilitate replay. Because of issues discovered with server-side only modifications, we propose a general framework for the auto-generation of client-side rewriting libraries. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of using a generated client-side rewriting library to augment the existing replay systems of web archives by crawling mementos replayed from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine with and without the generated client-side rewriter. By using the generated client-side rewriter, we were able to decrease the cumulative number of requests blocked by the content security policy of the Wayback Machine for 577 mementos by 87.5% and increased the cumulative number of requests made by 32.8%. We were also able to replay mementos that were previously not replayable from the Internet Archive. Many of the client-side rewriting ideas described in this work have been implemented into Wombat, a client-side URL rewriting system that is used by the Webrecorder, Pywb, and Wayback Machine playback systems.

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3 citations in Web of Science
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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Computer Science, Information Systems
Computer Science, Software Engineering
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