Saving a Design for Posterity

Hmm, html versions of old site design? Seems a little like overkill to me. Still, I would be inclined to agree that it beats a typical screenshot.

This is more a question than an answer: How do you save a design for posterity?

The problem is that site designs change over time but the main content doesn’t. Design-specific comments, both in your own site and linked to from other sites, become outdated and irrelevant each time the site design changes. Do we have an obligation to maintain those designs? Should there be a design archive?

Screenshots of previous designs only do so much. I think an HTML version is necessary. Especially to show off all the interactivity that exists on the page.

Imagine a feature on older archives that would allow you to revert the page to a previous design iteration. This would likely need some server-side code to determine if a previous design exists for the page.

Maybe it’d be cool to have every version time-stamped. Then you could set a parameter that said, “pretend it’s January 8, 2005.” Suddenly, the entire site is navigable like a crazy time warp. That would be neat. (if you were ever so geeky, it’d have a slider and fade from one version to the next…)

So, any thoughts? Source: snook.ca

[tags]html,design,screenshots,posterity[/tags]