2015-08-28 Original Header Replay Considered Coherent

Introduction As web archives have advanced over time, their ability to capture and playback web content has grown. The Memento Protocol, defined in RFC 7089 , defines an HTTP protocol extension that bridges the present and past web by allowing time-based content negotiation. Now that Memento is operational at many web archives, analysis of archive content is simplified. Over the past several years, I have conducted analysis of web archive temporal coherence. Some of the results of this analysis will be published at Hypertext'15 . This blog post discusses one implication of the research: the benefits achieved when web archives playback original headers. Archive Headers and Original Headers Consider the headers (Figure 1) returned for a logo from the ODU Computer Science Home Page as archived on Wed, 29 Apr 2015 15:15:23 GMT. HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: image/gif Last-Modified: Wed, 29 Apr 2015 15:15:23 GMT Figure 1. No Original Header Playback Try to answer the