Periodic Updating

Sometime last week I was reacquainted with an internet classic, the colour version of the F.N.O.R.D version of the Table of Condiments that Periodically Go Bad. Both of them look so dated and the HTML shows its age too. So, since I've got far too much free time on my hands and a copy of BBEdit, I spent an hour and brought it up to 21st century HTML/CSS, fixed a few typos and restyled the durations to look more like atomic orbital notation: Another Periodic Table of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad. I'm thinking of adding family headings as well as some of the radioactive condiments like sriracha sauce and others. The Periodic Table of Rejected Elements, The Periodic Table of Dessert, The Periodic Table of Candy and The Periodic Table of Haiku may provide me with some inspiration.

While I was updating the HTML, I was thinking about how many of the golden oldies of the net are moldering away and how long before they are completely lost. I squirrel away a lot of pages, documents and other information that might be of interest to Perl people sometime in the future, but how long before today's PDFs are unreadable by any readily available application? There are things from only 20 years ago that require quite a lot of machinations to decipher from formats that are only a footnote in the annals of computing. And what about jpegs? I know a few people who didn't make backups of their digital photo archives and accidentally deleted them all in just a few keystrokes - *poof* gone. A lot of archivists, real archivists, are concerned about the persistence of data since they don't live in internet time and think about 100 or more years into the future. SunSITE has a nice page filled with preservation resources for the digital age, but given the vast amount of data that's already disappearing, I think many of the goals are too lofty and dated for the current grim reality that the likelihood of large holes in the historical record from the 80s, 90s, 00s and beyond is a reasonable certainty. Relying on metadata and periodic updating of all the data out there on the net is just not very realistic in a time where most newspaper websites still can't render a single page in valid HTML and all current storage and backup media have a short shelf life in archival timelines.