annevk
commented
2 years ago I'm moving this to meta as this isn't really a question for the Steering Group. More something to consider for the community. Since we have Living Standards I tend to think that we can replace links as needed, so this problem shouldn't really come up. A thing we might benefit from though is some automated link checking so we can find network errors and 404s sooner.
After submitting my patch, I came up with a great idea: We should have archive.today links for every external reference on the specs and place it next to each external link in the references section. archive.today is known for not deleting anything, so it makes for a great archive provider. Other archive sites can and should be placed besides there as well for redundancy in case archive.today goes haywire as it has in the past, or in the case when archive.today doesn't archive a page properly or at all.
External links are subject to change - they can be hacked, stolen, etc, and the original content gone. Or a page can be moved to a different location, etc.. While the w3 and ietf sites are unlikely to go down, whatwg specs contain links to many other less-reliable sites that it could happen to. Even old RFCs and internet drafts have countless dead links contained within them.
Wikipedia and other organizations have been trying to preserve the integrity of their writings by having an archived link next to all of their external references. Whatwg should follow. After all, you can't call it a "living" standard if the backbone of it is dead.