Re:Web scraping via JavaScript runtime heap snapshots
by kvathupo on Friday April 29, 2022 @02:33PM
(#31209014)
The article brings up two interesting points for web preservation:
1. The reliance on externally hosted APIs
2. Source code obfuscation
For 1, in order to fully preserve a webpage, you'd have to go down the rabbit hole of externally hosted APIs, and preserve those as well. For example, sometimes a webpage won't render latex notation since a MathJax endpoint can't be connected to. Were we to save this webpage, we would need a copy of MathJax JS too.
For 2, I think WASM makes things more interesting. With Web Assembly, I'd imagine it's much easier to obfuscate source code: a preservationist would need a WASM decompiler for whatever source language was used.
1. The reliance on externally hosted APIs
2. Source code obfuscation
For 1, in order to fully preserve a webpage, you'd have to go down the rabbit hole of externally hosted APIs, and preserve those as well. For example, sometimes a webpage won't render latex notation since a MathJax endpoint can't be connected to. Were we to save this webpage, we would need a copy of MathJax JS too.
For 2, I think WASM makes things more interesting. With Web Assembly, I'd imagine it's much easier to obfuscate source code: a preservationist would need a WASM decompiler for whatever source language was used.