Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

I have written posts detailing how an archives modifications made to the JavaScript of a web page being replayed collided with the JavaScript libraries used by the page and how JavaScript + CORS is a deadly combination during replay . Today I am here to announce the release of a suite of high fidelity web archiving tools that help to mitigate the problems surrounding web archiving and a dynamic JavaScript powered web.To demonstrate this, consider the image above: the left-hand screen shot shows today's cnn.com archived and replayed in WAIL, whereas the right-hand screen shot shows cnn.com in the Internet Archive on 2017-07-24T16:00:02 . In this post, I will be covering: Updates to WAIL Release of node-warc Release of node-cdxj Release of Squidwarc WAIL Let me begin by announcing that WAIL has transitioned away from using Heritrix as the primary preservation method . Instead, WAIL now directly uses a full Chrome browser (Electron provided) as the pres

Mat Kelly recently posted  Lipstick or Ham: Next Steps For WAIL in which he spoke about the past, present, and potential future for WAIL. Web Archiving Integration Layer (WAIL) is a tool that seeks to address the disparity between institutional and individual archiving tools by providing one-click configuration and utilization of both Heritrix and Wayback from a user's personal computer. I am here to speak on the realization of WAIL's future by introducing WAIL-Electron. WAIL-Electron WAIL has been completely revised from a Python application using modern Web technologies into an Electron application. Electron combines a Chromium (Chrome) browser with Node.js allowing for native desktop applications to be created using only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The move to Electron has brought with it many improvements most importantly, of which is the ability to update and package WAIL for the three major operating systems: Linux, MacOS, and Windows. Support for these