On 12/11/2009, at 1:13 PM, 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?
This got written up in New Scientist today, for those who are
interested.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18158-timetravelling-browsers-navigat…
--
Andrew Garrett
agarrett(a)wikimedia.org
http://werdn.us/