While we ponder over today’s web technologies and real time search results, people over at Los Alamos National Lab’s (New Mexico) are going back a few steps. The team is developing a web browsing technology Memento that gives you the simulation, as if you were surfing the internet in the 1960’s. What this implies is that you’ll not have to navigate through the archives to find web pages from a particular date and time. The technology basically tweaks around with a function of HTTP called content negotiation. Content negotiation is always working while you are busy riding the internet wave, for example a browser in Germany accessing a URL will retrieve a HTML page in German language. The technology is a composite of both software and the server that will make it as easy as clicking on a drop down list and selecting the date & time for the web page.
Jakob Voss (Developer with Common Library Network Gottingen, Germany) has taken a test ride of the web browsing system and advocates Memento’s use.
Jacob Voss
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.
Van de Sompel (Scientist at Los Alamos)
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.
You can check out Memento in action via a Memento client, the page load speed can be slow as it is under development currently.
Via: Trak
