Are you an author of web pages and you don't want your links to die? Here is a really easy way to achieve just that:
- Express the creation date of your pages in a machine-actionable manner, using the schema.org approach.
- Robust Links currently supports
datePublishedanddateModifiedattributes.
- Robust Links currently supports
- Include the robustlinks JavaScript and CSS files into your pages as shown below.
- The result will be that each link will be augmented with the ability to see the linked resource as it was around creation time of the page. This is achieved by resolving links using the Memento Time Travel infrastructure that aggregates web archives, worldwide. At any time, even when a link breaks, the Robust Link will lead to archived content.
- Even better link robustness can be achieved by decorating the links as explained in the Link Decoration document.
- You can read about the motivations for using robust links here.
Simply append the following lines to the <head> of your HTML source:
<!-- RobustLinks CSS -->
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/tools/js/robustlinks.css" />
<!-- RobustLinks Javascript -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/tools/js/robustlinks-min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/tools/js/robustlinks-uri-exclude-list.js"></script>After adding the RobustLinks javascript source to your HTML file, a new link icon will appear next to all the decorated links in the page. Clicking the down arrow in this link icon will pop up a menu with one or more of the following items, depending on the decoration attributes provided in each of the links.
-
Get near link date ...: When clicking this menu item, the javascript library will use the datetime provided in thedata-versiondateattribute along with the original url and redirect you to the closest memento around that datetime using the Memento Time Travel service. -
Get from ...: Clicking this menu item will redirect you to the memento url provided in thedata-versionurlattribute. -
Get at current date: Clicking this menu item will take you to the original url provided in thedata-originalurlattribute. -
Get near page creation date ...: This menu item is similar to theGet near link date ..., except it uses the Schema.org attributedatePublished, if provided in the linking HTML page. -
Get near page modified date ...: This menu item is similar to theGet near link date ..., except it uses the Schema.org attributedateModified, if provided in the linking HTML page.
You can exclude certain URLs in your webpage from showing the robust links drop down menu by adding them to the robustlinks-uri-exclude-list.js file. Typically, URLs in a webpage that point to other pages in your site, or URLs to any redirection services can be included in this exclusion list.
To exclude URLs, simply download a copy of the robustlinks-uri-exclude-list.js file, edit this to include the URLs that need to be excluded, and replace the URL of the robustlinks-uri-exclude-list.js file in the HTML source with the new HTTP URL of the local file.
The exclusion file contains a list of either full HTTP URLs to be excluded, or URL patterns constructed as Javascript Regular Expressions. Simply put the URL patterns within quotes separated by commas, except for the last URI pattern. A sample exclusion list looks like:
var RLuriPatternsToExclude = [
"https?://dx.doi.org*",
"https?://purl.org*",
"https?://identifiers.org*",
"https?://handle.net*",
"https?://n2t.net*"
];See the license.