I've thought about this. Keep it completely static, no back-end server required, minimal front-end javascript, mostly plain HTML.
The key, as many others have said, is to make it easy to copy/archive (on computers, archive.org, etc). A simple set of linked pages (with graphics in widely-used formats, eg JPEG/PNG) is your best bet.
What the stone tablets crowd here misses is that a lot of cultural production today that's very important--major artworks, political speeches, movies, court records--is electronic. This means that by necessity, unless you think that entire corpus will get discarded, future societies are going to develop archival systems capable of indexing and decoding all this information.
Also - storage capacity has grown a lot, and that's a trend I'm betting will continue. Today, entire libraries' worth of books and magazines can be mass-duplicated and carried around on disk drives or USB sticks. What does this trend look like in 500 years?
I also think using open systems and formats has a better chance of survival than proprietary ones, if only because there are more reference implementations for how to convert bits into something people can understand/experience. There's a lot of important stuff written in .doc (MS Word) but my money's on HTML or ASCII, or even PDF if you want long-term survival.
uhhh, how about no javascript. and no CSS. and ideally, no HTML other than <html>, <head>, <body>; for posterity's sake.
also, for posterity, raw or bitmapped files with a header of width x height and just raw pixel values is going to survive way longer than whatever gif,png,jpeg format you might pick.
The key, as many others have said, is to make it easy to copy/archive (on computers, archive.org, etc). A simple set of linked pages (with graphics in widely-used formats, eg JPEG/PNG) is your best bet.
What the stone tablets crowd here misses is that a lot of cultural production today that's very important--major artworks, political speeches, movies, court records--is electronic. This means that by necessity, unless you think that entire corpus will get discarded, future societies are going to develop archival systems capable of indexing and decoding all this information.
Also - storage capacity has grown a lot, and that's a trend I'm betting will continue. Today, entire libraries' worth of books and magazines can be mass-duplicated and carried around on disk drives or USB sticks. What does this trend look like in 500 years?
I also think using open systems and formats has a better chance of survival than proprietary ones, if only because there are more reference implementations for how to convert bits into something people can understand/experience. There's a lot of important stuff written in .doc (MS Word) but my money's on HTML or ASCII, or even PDF if you want long-term survival.