url.html

<meta charset="utf-8">
<title> URL </title>
<style>@import url(style.css);</style>

<h1>How to reference a <abbr title="Universal Resource Locator">URL</abbr>?</h1>

<p>
Unlike books, which may be torn, lost, given to another person
without you ever remembering about it, URLs die in a different way:
<em>they stop opening</em>. Or entirely different content is being
loaded instead of what the URL once contained. Just like we humans, URLs
are mortal

<p>
Despite that, we still want to reference URLs like we reference our
books, in a nice list at the end of the text. This almost works
well with books because many instances of a book are typically
printed. For a URL, it is common to be served by a VM on a cheap
VPS server, and the owner might just one day think "well I don't
<em>really</em> want to keep my server running, so why don't I shut it down
to save me a $2/mo.?"

<p>
<strong>So whenever you reference a URL:</strong>

<ol>
  <li>
    Download the page and save it somewhere, your vault of downloaded pages
    for future reference. <em>What are you saying? How come</em> you still
    don't have a repository for downloaded webpages? Where are you storing
    them, in your head?
  </li>
  <li>
    I suggest archiving in <abbr title="MIME HTML">MHTML</abbr> format.
    Brave, a web browser, can do that, and so can Chrome an Safari, I thinkg?..
  </li>
  <p class="slide">
    Did you know that MHTML files can be safely sent over email as plain text?
    That's why I like to call it "Mail HTML". I erronously read MHTML all the
    time as "Meta HTML", which is not &rarr;. If you want to invent a format
    that you want to call "Meta HTML", I suggest abbreviating it as
    <em>&mu;</em>HTML, with an italicized <em>&mu;</em>, of course. That will
    earn you 100 bonus points from me 
  </p>
  <li>
    Now, of course, you can't just put your archived page online. Not in the
    <abbr title="World-Wide Web">WWW</abbr> highly influenced by
    <abbr title="Western Values">WV</abbr> which assign high morality score
    to the act of not giving you copy rights. But at least consider archiving
    it using a <a href="https://web.archive.org/">Wayback Machine</a>,
    and whenever you reference a URL, put a link to a Wayback Machine archived
    version near it as well: people will be grateful when the URL dies
  </li>
</ol>

<p>
Now, after reading this, you've become a <em>URL referencing expert</em>,
my dear reader, so go and reference with care, teaching this knowledge to
others along the way