I’m posting this on the last day of 2019. As I write it, the second post I ever made on meyerweb says it was published “20 years, 6 days ago”. It was published on the second-to-last day of 1999, which was 20 years and one day ago.
What I realized, once the discrepancy was pointed out to me (hat tip: Eric Portis), is the five-day error is there because in the two decades since I posted it, there have been five leap days. When I wrote the code to construct those relative-time strings, I either didn’t think about leap days, or if I did, I decided a day or two here and there wouldn’t matter all that much.
Which is to say, I failed to think about the consequences of my code running over long periods of time. Maybe a day or two of error isn’t all that big a deal, in human-friendly relative-time output. If a post was six years and two days ago but the code says 6 and 1, well, nobody will really care that much even if they notice. But five days is noticeable, and what’s more, it’s a little human-unfriendly. It’s noticeable. It jars.
…
As I mentioned in my comments on a repost last week, I work to try to make the things I publish to this site last. But that’s not to say that problems can’t creep in, either because of fundamental bugs left unnoticed until later on (such as the image recompression problem that’s recently lead to some of my older images going wonky; I’m working on it) or else because because of environmental changes e.g. in the technologies that are supported and the ways in which they’re used. The latter are helped by standards and by an adherence to them, but the former will trip over Web developers time and time again, and it’s possible that there’s nothing we can do about it.
No system is perfect, and we don’t have time to engineer every system, every site, every page in a way that near-guarantees its longevity; not by a long shot. I tripped myself over just the year before last when I added Content-Security-Policy headers to my site and promptly broke every embedded YouTube or Vimeo video because they didn’t fit the newly (and retroactively) enforced pattern of allowable content. Such problems are easy to create when you’re maintaining a long-running system with a lot of data. I’m only talking about my blog, but larger, older and/or more-complex systems (of which I’ve worked on a few!) come with their own multitudinous challenges.
That said, the Web has demonstrated a resilience that surpasses most of what is expected in consumer computing. If you want to run a video game from 1994 or even 2001 on a modern computer, you’re likely to find that you have to put in considerably more work than you would have on the day it was released! But even some of the oldest webpages still-existing remain usable today.
Occasionally, though: a “hip” modern technology without the backing of widespread browser standards comes along and creates a dark age. Flash created such a dark age; now there are millions of Flash-dependent web pages that simply don’t work any longer. Java created another. And I worry that the unnecessary overuse of front-end rendering technologies are creating a third that we’re living through right now, oblivious to the data we’re creating and losing.
Let’s think about longevity.