One reason this is important is that it can be hard to tell that pages at archive.epa.gov are in an archive. It looks obvious when you’re there in a browser with modern CSS:
But that big banner is a background image on a pseudo element, and there’s no representative text about the archive anywhere in the page. (Honestly, this seems designed to be inaccessible, but I don’t want to speculate too much about what led to this very problematic technical setup.) In any case, without a lot better rendering support (for part of the solution to that, see https://github.com/edgi-govdata-archiving/web-monitoring-ui/issues/600), there’s just nothing on the page to indicate that it’s an archive. Besides, there are probably a number of other different situations where this is especially relevant and worth calling out.
We should probably consider changes to redirects in the priority calculation, or at least call them out one of the columns of the sheet.
For example, a couple weeks ago, https://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/about-national-health-and-environmental-effects-research-laboratory-nheerl went from being a 404 page to suddenly having content and a 200 status code again, but what really happened was that the 404 page started redirecting to an archived copy of the page at https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/about-national-health-and-environmental-effects-research-laboratory-nheerl.html
See the above example in the API:
One reason this is important is that it can be hard to tell that pages at
archive.epa.govare in an archive. It looks obvious when you’re there in a browser with modern CSS:But that big banner is a background image on a pseudo element, and there’s no representative text about the archive anywhere in the page. (Honestly, this seems designed to be inaccessible, but I don’t want to speculate too much about what led to this very problematic technical setup.) In any case, without a lot better rendering support (for part of the solution to that, see https://github.com/edgi-govdata-archiving/web-monitoring-ui/issues/600), there’s just nothing on the page to indicate that it’s an archive. Besides, there are probably a number of other different situations where this is especially relevant and worth calling out.
See also: https://github.com/edgi-govdata-archiving/web-monitoring-ui/issues/509