That cached page from 2003 I tried to open was just a white screen

Went looking for an old tutorial about fixing a Sony CRT TV I remember from some geocities site. Wayback Machine showed it existed but the actual page just loaded as a blank white box. Anyone else ran into pages that are archived but completely empty?

2 comments

2 Comments

jordanc6818d ago

Ngl you're kinda off about the interactive diagrams thing. Most CRT TV guides from 2003 were just plain text with maybe a jpeg of the flyback transformer. The real issue is that the Wayback Machine sometimes archives the page but not the images or external files. So you get the HTML structure but nothing loads because the image links are pointing to Geocities servers that died 15 years ago. Also a lot of those old sites used framesets which the Wayback Machine totally fumbles. Check if the url ends in a frame URL vs the actual content page that might be buried somewhere else in the archive.

ramirez.daniel18d ago

Did you check if the page was actually loading from a script or a Java applet that's now dead? A lot of those old Geocities pages relied on stuff like Flash or embedded media players that just don't work anymore, so the Wayback Machine captures the HTML but the actual content never shows up... It's especially common with those old CRT TV guides because they sometimes had interactive diagrams or code for the service menu that needed external plugins. Also sometimes the archive just grabbed the "under construction" placeholder instead of the real page, so you're left with a blank white ghost of a site...