Maybe a better question is, what would HTML have looked like in the time of Shakespeare?

   <doth whence="bæc">Forsooth!</doth>

Haha, reminds me of "If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript"

https://www.amazon.com/Hemingway-Wrote-JavaScript-Angus-Crol...

which is actually kind of amusing and creative.

Holy Carp and Salmon, that's great!

This Shakespeare JavaScript is fantastic and I want to write all my comments in this style: https://imgur.com/gallery/IKlBAX0

EDIT: huh, imgur removes the word "javascript" from post titles and descriptions. Weird that they couldn't find a better way to stop javascript attacks.

Not only comments. You can write your whole program in Shakespeare Programming Language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Langua...

This is awesome.

I love this!!

Is this book worthwhile?

TIL: There's a "Shakespeare" esoteric programming language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Langua...

It’s generated occasional commentary here, but not recently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639119

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4910622

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1415528

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3172021

I’d like to think HTML would have used different notation for syntax e.g. the section sign for open tags and pilcrow for closing:

    §doth whence="bæc"§ Forsooth! ¶doth¶

And written in secretary hand [1] instead of monospace.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_hand

I was going to say (as if that were the main objection) that the = there was apocryphal, but I had my centuries wrong: Recorde invented it in the mid-16th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equals_sign#History

I wonder when angle braces were introduced?

Actually, as an assignment operator it dates back thousands of years:

    let there = light  # fix dark issue

This table on Wikipedia says the inequality symbols were first used in 1631[1]. However guillemets (« ») date to the mid sixteenth century[2] and are still used as quotation marks in many languages. Although according to the page about brackets[3], chevrons were the earliest form of brackets, however I couldn’t find a year.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_mathematical_symbols_...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket#History

Recorde is one of those intellectual heroes I only learned of a few years ago. It seems like no big deal now, but using a symbol instead of words to represent am equation was revolutionary.

> apocryphal

I think you mean anachronistic there.

Yes, thank you.

This is the best HN comment I've seen in a while, ha!

:)

brilliant!

> Think archival grade materials and ink, then add translations into Mandarin, Arabic, and Spanish . . .

I think this is actually wrong. It certainly doesn't hurt to write on fired clay tablets, or to "store" your papyrus documents in an extremely low-humidity environment. That might enable accidental preservation. But at the of the day (or at the end of the millennium), things survive because lots of people care about them.

You mention Anglo Saxon. That's an interesting example, because the entire corpus of Anglo Saxon literature is easily anthologized in a single volume, and there is exactly one extant copy of what most scholars regard as the most important thing written in the language (Beowulf). But the truth is this: Most of it is gone, because people stopped caring about what was written in it.

But psalters? Bibles? Church histories? It's an embarrassment of riches. Why? Because people cared very deeply about those things.

And translation helps, but again, it's not quite enough. The instructions for my dehumidifier are in eight different languages. Where did I put that again?

To come at it from another angle: Finding a paper copy of a 1955 Seattle phonebook is extremely difficult. But why? It was written on paper, there were thousands and thousands of copies printed, none of them have actually disintegrated into dust, and yet . . .

So: My advice would be to make that web page pertain to something of epochal importance to millions of people. They'll do the rest.

The tricky part is that it’s hard to be sure that people will keep caring about the same things for a long time to come. As you said, most of what was written in Anglo-Saxon is gone, even though some of it besides Beowulf probably had “epochal importance” to those who lived at the time. Similarly, many works that were highly esteemed in the Greco-Roman world were eventually lost. Cultures change, religions change, languages change. And they all do so unpredictably.

The hardest part isn’t writing something that millions of people find critically important—it’s ensuring that society will continue to find the same things important for centuries. A temporal value-alignment problem.

> to make that web page pertain to something of epochal importance to millions of people

which is a hard task. and irrelevant to the OP's question.

There are many things that people would want to preserve, but is of no importance to the grand scheme of humanity. You're basically saying that unless your works is of such importance that millions of people generations to come would voluntarily preserve it, the works do not deserve preservation.

I've said nothing about what "deserves" preservation, but only what sort of things tend to be preserved over periods on the scale of centuries. And yes: My contention is that unless a substantial community of people voluntarily commit to preserving something, it likely will not survive (or will do so accidentally).

I'm not quite following why this is not relevant to the OP's question. I suppose I'm saying that it's not just a hard task, but an almost impossible one. Lots of people (2000 years ago, say) thought that what they were writing was of world-historical significance; today, we barely know their names. Others dashed off dictated letters to small, fragile communities of early followers and just happened to have created among the most well preserved texts of all time.

All I'm really saying here is that among the titanic forces determining which is which, the type of ink used seems not to be a matter of much importance.

It's a different side to the question that others are answering, and it's interesting to think about.

What does last? Making something a tradition can help smooth over logic. Making it part of a long running organisation would help (organisations can exist for multiple centuries).

Perhaps an organisation dedicated to preserving messages through the ages, and encourage - say - a Christmas message? More people involved mean more care.

I think those are orthogonal.

Sure, you have the biggest chance of having something preserved if enough people care about it. This is a case where, as you rightly point out, technology matters not.

But we can still discuss technologies of preservation, especially in the light of non-physical creations like works presented on a digital machine.

And the very fact it survives makes it noteworthy - if archeologists found a collection of well preserved shitposts from 2500 BC it would be valuable - even if worthless when recorded.

Create nuclear blasts that encode the information in short microbursts. Info will be available in the carbon record and in tree rings around the world .... profit?

At that rate, just make sure it's part of the human genome :)

Short story where SETI programmers turn new message hunting code on archived files and it detects a message in the human genome rather than in radio signals from the cosmos: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html

( https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/252832/short-story... )

I really wish someone would make a good sci-fi movie around stories like this. No space lasers or wormholes, just high concept stories

This feels like it might fit a series like The X-Files or The Outer Limits more than a full movie; there isn't much more to it than the twist; aside from that it's a story about some people.

If you don't mind them being shorts, there are some good sci-fi stories on the Dust and Omeleto channels on YouTube. e.g. this "One Minute Time Machine" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBkBS4O3yvY - has just two people, a bench, and a Time MacGuffin.

Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOwKExagzdQ - "The Tunnel Ahead", 15 minute short set in an overpopulated world.

I do feel that many include space because it's fun and can be CGI modelled, or time travel because it makes for a cheap sci-fi plot, and if you rule those out you get things like The OceanMaker ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWCGK4nneeU ) which I didn't like so much because nothing really happens. Whether there are more concepty ones with more nuanced plot, they probably didn't catch my eye to watch.

You might like the "man from earth". It isn't exactly what you've described here, but it's a great movie. The entire thing takes place as a conversation amongst a group of friends where they extrapolate out on somebody's seemingly crazy assertion.

Never, even in video games they always have to throw a fantasy element in :/

Comic with a similar twist: http://dresdencodak.com/2009/07/12/fabulous-prizes/

By the author of autoCAD no less! Thanks for sharing this. You have enriched my day.

Or maybe a bit more likely to survive longer: cockroach genome or tardigrade genome :-)

like in ST:TNG where it turns out there's a piece of code in the DNA of all the humanoid species that together form a message from the civilization that seeded them

Great episode. A two-parter I think.

what if humans go extinct in the next 300 years?

> vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot since then, and if you look back a further 500 years (to 1021AD) the "English" spoken in those days was a lot closer to Frisian than anything we'd understand.

The world was also a very different place, I suspect language will evolve far slower over the next 500 years due to the vast new interconnectedness that society has never experienced before. I think in 500 years, someone looking back at a website from today will find something far more intelligible than when we look back 500 years. The language will be closer and they will have a lot of detailed context to place it in.

I know this goes against the strangely attractive premise that civilisations rise and fall and we are ants running around thinking we are important in the moment and nothing we do will last... but the world really has become a more interconnected and stable place and it seems far more probable that it will remain that way. If there is an empire that could fall today and spell the end, it's communication technology.

We went from fotolog to Facebook to Instagram to tiktok in a decade or so. In a few years more it will be something 3d we can't completely envision, who knows in a few decades. In each iteration language changes faster, cause memes are language.

In 500 years this will be gibberish. Who knows if people will even know how to read?

We already seem to be going to hieroglyphics, except that it’s with emoji and has dialects depending on where and by whom its used. I’ve seen adults unable to understand the emoji lingo that teens used to communicate a lot of things, and this developed in the span of a decade (or lesser) with the widespread availability of emojis. I can only shudder to think of how complex and divergent things from now would seem even 50 years from now.

It might not be gibberish. But let's pretend one possible next step is computer assisted/accelerated cognition.

Which means your incredibly interesting autobiographical web page which will be about as deep and interesting as an emoji, and hold attention for roughly as long.

Another possible - currently more likely - next step is extinction because of climate change, so there's no guarantee that OP will even have great grandchildren.

We can understand Shakespeare with a bit of work ( mainly sound things out ) but Shakespeare himself would have had difficulty understanding his great grandfather.

> The world was also a very different place

Not...really? This is the whole reason people talk about over-important ants...

Without getting into anything more exotic like heat death of the universe (there is some contention about what this actually means for us, also measured in billions of years not 500 of op), the biggest issue is how to keep things "on".

Plentiful energy is an absolute requirement of modern culture and society, and in 500 years we have gone through at least three major different energy source changes (animal oil, coal, gas) - there are others, but they have had less general impact. Each of those sources of energy dramatically defined their respective cultures, generations, assuming we find new ones, or even worse assuming we don't and have to go back to burning wood or (if you are lucky) using solar power, society will again dramatically change as a result.

A different way to keep things "on", would be to use almost no power. Combine a powerless or restful display (e-ink), with some form of permanent storage, spend some time on the electronics to ensure they are robust (no capacitors, regulate your power to ensure resistors don't blow out), combine with a power source which requires little maintenance (wind, solar, thermal). Maybe even incorporate some RFID-esque technology, where the device is powered by attempting to read it. You would have to build out the network which could do that - I don't think today's internet can function without power hungry routers, switches, hubs.

On the software side, simple, tiny, and "visible" - not necessary "human readable", as others have pointed out language or customs may have changed in the future, but something which is inherently and simply debug-able. Simpler said than done, but think components which clearly display what they are doing over providing black box interfaces, interpreted, modular code, perhaps even a custom CPU which has a clear interface "under the hood". This will aid in people being able to adapt whatever devices besides the powerless display (which comes with your device) they want to connect, on whichever protocol they want to connect on (HTTP 2.0 is very different compared to HTTP 1.0, 3.0 may be even more foreign, or HTTP may no longer exist).

As for people caring about it, well, I don't think the technology for this really exists today, so I imagine such a device would be historically significant, if nothing else. You could also store famous works of literature, or prove maths concepts, or build up a religion around the device. Bibles have lasted (at least as long as Christianity has been dominant) for about the past two millennia, Gilgamesh is ~3-4k years old, thanks to Archimedes, Geometry predates the new testament, arguably if the library of Alexandria had survived, we might have had works on chemistry, literature predating all of those (Greek Fire is the famous example here, but there is of course the whole legend of Egypt, surrounding not just the pyramids but the 'powers' of the Egyptian Priests - likely scientists of their time much like the Catholic tradition).

Which is all to say, the internet as an architecture is ephemeral and short-lived. The work on a distributed internet is a step in the "right direction", but most if not all implementations are doomed to failure by both over-complexity and a requirement that somebody pay an electric bill. Certain parts of the internet network, such as TCP/IP, or the insight to wrap messages multiple times (electrical, local, network, service, application), are not just salvageable but unlikely to change significantly, since they are properties somewhat inherent to communications networks (need for addressing, need to couple disparate systems, need for different applications/services to communicate somewhat independently), but more complex networking concepts in active usage, things like network topologies, routing tables, algorithms, anything resulting in a requirement for active power, is not compatible with long term archival and retrieval.

Perhaps in the end, the question is akin to asking "how can I keep a flame burning for 500 years" - the answer is realistically you probably can't. Campfires serve a different purpose than sign posts, you can create a yellow sculpture to capture the sun and heat an area consistently for hundreds of years, but it won't be a campfire. It also won't be a sign post, more of a monument. Still pretty cool. :)

Maybe also start a traditoin in your family to have many children and to memorise the website up to a single character, like a sacred text.

Some texts survived long time in oral form, I heard.

Forming the sources as a verse could help here.

Mostly oriented to texts, altough images can be memorized in their hex encoding, for example.

Sounds like what they did in the Netflix show Travelers, where important information about the world was encoded into DNA and kept alive within the bodies of specific travelers, called Archivists. This allowed information to be transmitted over long periods of time to the Director.

You’re onto something here. Organized religions are some of the very few institutions that survived for thousands of years with little change.

> Organized religions are some of the very few institutions that survived for thousands of years with little change.

Which organized religion are you referring to here? All the big ones have changed immensely.

Just because religions go through major institutional changes, since they are in fact very human at their core, you have to give some credit to the fact we are still talking about Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad.

At least, the Torah has survived with minimal change.

Well we don’t have the autographs for any holy text past a certain point, so I’m not sure that’s true. But with faith it doesn’t matter.

We have physical copies of older versions. Just because it's religion, doesn't mean it's made up.

The Dead Sea scrolls can be compared to the “oral” tradition (mostly actually written) to see how far it shifted.

Ironically the dictionaries you mention have greatly stabilised language. Language is going to be far more stable over the next 500 years. I wouldn't worry about it in the slightest.

Is it ? The language is evolving very fast. Compare English from the 50's to what is spoken now, take into account the major dialects around the world...

I don't see much stability.

There are different kinds of stability. One is whether the same language is spoken informally. Another is whether people are able understand earlier texts. I'm pretty sure texts from the 20th and 19th century are commonly read in High School, TV shows from 1960s onward are watched, etc. Having the past ever-present makes it something current informal language relates to.

Many, many people speaking English also creates an incentive for stability at the same time it creates variation.

I have a book from the 1700s on my bedside table I can read just fine...

My lived experience is I can read texts from hundreds of years ago just fine. Old mate is struggling with 50s tv.

The only tip is to use stable language. IE don't use the term dab or vibe or whatever the latest fad niche speak is.

I think whoever is interested in a 500 year old website is going to be ok.

This comment will be fine in hundreds of years. I completely expect (at least Australians) to continue to use “old mate” for a long time to come :).

Thats the difference right ?

One is a 'phase' the other is cross generational.

> The only tip is to use stable language. IE don't use the term dab or vibe or whatever the latest fad niche speak is.

Stuff like that can easily be looked up though, there are a number of "youth/hipster speak" dictionaires, pages like KnowYourMeme...

Or picked up pretty easily. P. G. Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle use some anachronistic language but it’s still 99% understandable without a dictionary.

I don't think it has evolved much at all. New words, yes, and some words fell out of favor. But you can find a book written in the 50s or a movie from the 50s and you would have no trouble understanding it. I'm fact, without context, you likely wouldn't notice it was from 70 years ago.

Are you saying it would NOT have been useful to historians/genealogists if people 500 years ago had produced perfectly preserved documentation of all of their writings in their language at that time?

You're also using 500 years of antiquated human communication technology to extrapolate what the next 500 years will be like. Shakespeare wasn't taking selfies, writing blog posts, and responding to commenters in real time back then. English/natural language evolved differently in a world that wasn't connected to the internet. There's no reason for me to believe the last 500 years of communication will be anything like the next 500.

Yes.

500 years is but a drop in the ocean of the future. We have lost a fair amount of the past and find even little fragments from long ago to be incredibly illuminating. e.g. the Rosetta Stone, or the dead sea scrolls. What would we know now if the library of Alexandria didn't burn?

You can walk the street of Rome and read inscriptions that are 2000 years old, they will either be close enough to any latin language or you may have some notions of latin yourself. My point being that english is probably much more significant culturally today than latin ever was. The chances that it will be some sort of forgotten language are pretty slim (though I am sure it will have evolved).

Now the real question is whether that website will have more significance than a XVI century grocery list, and be really worth preserving to your descendants…

Yes, inscriptions like "long live the LX regiment" or whatever graffiti. (Kind of joking.)

Given the extent of the Roman Empire, I think Latin achieved some pretty significant cultural status. Afaik, Catholic mass stopped being in latin in the 1960's. That's ~3rd century to 20th century. So in use roughly 3x as long as English? (Not a specialist.)

It did in europe and northern africa. English is spoken (“airport english” that is) pretty much across the whole world. Entire industries only communicate in english. It is the international language of the elites, very much like latin was at a much smaller scale. And it has already influenced other languages that regularly use english words, and that’s only after a century of influence.

And given that something like half of the words in your post descend from latin, we might even regard english as a kind of daughter language. Of course I'm painting in overly broad strokes for the sake of conversation.

I would also add the social element - if you want your kids and grandkids to be able to read it, pass custody of the website well before you die (perhaps in a will?) and tell as many friends and family as you can. I know I would happily administer a deceased friend's website until i could no longer myself.

But who will administer the site after you pass? It's much harder to justify the administering effort, when you never even knew the original guy.

In where I live, there's a sweet wine made from a grape from greece, which recipe and genetics has been conserved for a few hundred years because one rich guy stated so in his will, so he gave away a building (was an hospital, now a museum), and in exchange, their heirs must recieve 2 boxes of 6 bottles of such wine each year, or otherwise the building lease is off.

Something like that might work

Super interesting, encoding information inside of a lease contract. It's almost blockchain-esque!

What’s the name of the wine, and how can you get some? I’m very curious!

Ha, I didn't expect this to be one of my top rated comments.

It is very good wine indeed. It's called Malvasia.

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvas%C3%ADa_(uva)

There's a dry and sweet version, I prefer the sweet one. https://cellerdelhospital.cat/producte/malvasia-dolca/

They do ship internationally it seems, this one is the one from the story =)

The origin city of the grape variety, which came by ship to my city at the time, was monemvasia https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monemvas%C3%ADa

Thank you for sharing this information. My order is in.

Start a cult of data protectors, maybe your kids?

Depending where you’re at in life, you could probably raise your kids to understand that keeping the site online is paramount.

Similar to those wise families that teach their kids to take care of their elders.

Adding money might help. We have a small scale investment in our cap table from a German family who have kept their money together for 650 years…

Seems like the greater feat would be keeping your family size small over 650 years. Most any level of wealth will start to fade if you have to split it amongst 1,000 heirs.

Hence the effective disinheriting of second or third sons of noble houses (the old saying was something like heir, army, priest).

That assumes language will continue to evolve the same way now as it did 1,000 years ago. Back then everyone couldn't read and people were separated. With mass media that's no longer the case.

With increasing hostility towards education, we may also regress.

Compare your texting to 18th century personal letters. I don't disagree, but language will still evolve significantly.

Perhaps our developer docs will come to be seen as some kind of rare "Formal English" (I mean, it kind of is already) and the rest of communication will be in ... emoji??

Naturally, but it's going to evolve differently with so many people connected via the internet.

There is no doubt that we are still in the incunabula of the computer age. Paper, we know, can last for five hundred years, but even once ubiquitous and well-understood media--floppy disks--are now scarce and getting scarcer. The only reliable way of writing for millennia is on stone.

The progression of language has been affected by mass media, which has a standardizing influence. Written language will be affected by translation technologies that are at the moment unimaginable. Once complicated problems, e.g. the Chinese typewriter--have been resolved, and ordinary Chinese typing, which used to be limiting to typesetting speeds can now outpace the fastest QWERTY speedster by 2x or 3x or more. Language will not be the problem in the future that it was in the past.

Agree and disagree. For one, English and other languages are evolving faster now than before, due to the speed of communication, so spoken language in 500 years (even barring something weird like brain implants) is probably going to be even more different than modern English compared to Shakespeare.

However, there are examples of languages and documents that have been preserved, e.g. a Latin bible. Because of its status as a holy document and the vast power of the Catholic church, its tradition of teaching Latin, not just to read the bible, but conduct business and masses, the Latin in which the bible was written was very well preserved.

Already done for the next 1000 years.

https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

And then someone forgets to renew the domain.

Great comment! I’m curious, why did you choose Arabic, Mandarin, and Spanish?

They are the most widely spoken languages world wide after English.

English comes after Mandarin and Spanish according to most sources, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...

Edit: ugh sorry, I realize you wrote spoken languages (which English would be in the top at, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...), not native/first language/by population. Ignore me!

great answer to a very interesting question!

for inspiration on how to preserve things for future generations we may look at religion.

So kill whoever does not memorize my website?

Where are you getting 28 years old from?

Mosaic release date maybe? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)

Maybe.

W3C had a pretty big 30th birthday thing recently. https://www.w3.org/blog/2021/08/30-years-on-from-introducing...