Instead of witting it as an extra header to HTTP protocol ... why don't
they write it as a proxy to wikimedia (or any other site the want to
temporal proxy). Getting a new HTTP header out there is not an easy task
at best a small percentage of sites will support it and then you need to
deploy clients and write user interfaces that support it as well.
If viewing old version of sites is something interesting to them. It
probably best to write a interface a firefox extension or grease monkey
script that integrates makes a "temporal" interface of their likening
for the mediawiki api (presumably the "history button" fails to
represent their vision? )... for non-mediawiki sites could access "the
way back machine".
If the purpose is to support searching or archival. Then its probably
best to proxy the mediaWiki api through a proxy that they setup that
supports those temporal requests across all sites (ie an enhanced
interface to the wayback machine?)
--michael
Daniel Kinzler wrote:
Hi all
The Memento Project <http://www.mementoweb.org/> (including the Los Alamos
National Laboratory (!) featuring Herbert Van de Sompel of OpenURL fame) is
proposing a new HTTP header, X-Accept-Datetime, to fetch old versions of a web
resource. They already wrote a MediaWiki extension for this
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Memento> - which would of course be
particularly interesting for use on Wikipedia.
Do you think we could have this for Wikimedia project? I think that would be
very nice indeed. I recall that ways to look at last weeks main page have been
discussed before, and I see several issues:
* the timestamp isn't a unique identifier, multiple revisions *might* have the
same timestamp. We need a tiebreak (rev_id would be the obvious choice).
* templates and images also need to be "time warped". It seems like the
extension does not address this at the moment. For flagged revisions we do have
such a machnism, right? Could that be used here?
* Squids would need to know about the new header, and by pass the cache when
it's used.
so, what do you think? what does it take? Can we point them to the missing bits?
-- daniel
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