Cycle 2025.1: Archival Data Pages

[larsyencken]

Make it possible to embed archival data pages.

See: Figma

Scope

Must do

• Milestone: archival works from a local folder
  • content-hashed assets
  • strip out dynamic/interactive contents from data page (see FigJam)
  • link to the correct, archived assets:
    • JS
    • CSS
    • Fonts
    • dods.json
    • data & metadata files
    • ➡️ eventually, we don't want any requests going out to ourworldindata.org (and owid.io)
• Milestone: Automatic, incremental archival rebuilds
  • automatically bake archival page on changes to the underlying chart
    • chart config (e.g. FAUST) or indicator update
    • look into: is there a build system that can help us there, in comparing inputs and checking if an incremental rebuild is necessary?
  • needs a DB table
• Milestone: Set up public infrastructure
  • Set up infrastructure: R2 bucket & subdomain
  • URL scheme (e.g. archive.ourworldindata.org/202501161306/grapher/life-expectancy)
    • The timestamp is the start of the archival bake
• Milestone: link to latest archival on production data page
  • DB table that knows about the various archival versions of a data page
    • id, archival_timestamp, grapher_id, grapher_slug, hash_of_inputs
    • primary(id), index(grapher_id), index(archival_timestamp)
  • Link to the latest archive version of that data page in the citation
• Other tasks
  • Safe backup of archival bucket (Mojmir/Lars/Daniel)

Should do

• Milestone: SEO & Google Scholar considerations
  • correct canonical URLs etc. for Google Scholar & other SEO
    • exclude from indexing by Google etc.?
  • 🐇 rabbit hole potential
• Milestone: reduced tracking
  • Disable Sentry, CF Analytics
  • Only use cookieless tracking for GA?
  • Disable cookie notice
  • Change privacy policy accordingly
  • ❓ Strip out this tracking code entirely from the JS bundle
  • ❓ Replace cdnjs dynamic polyfill with explicit in-bundle polyfills, e.g. via @vitejs/plugin-legacy
• Milestone: design tweaks for archival page
  • changed header that includes archival date
  • link out to live site
• Other tasks
  • Make (static) thumbnails work for URL previews
    • restore removed code (🔨 Switch grapher exports to use CF worker #4464) in GrapherImageBaker.tsx
  • Remove fetch request to detect-country.owid.io
  • enforce local-only data download in the download tab

Unclear

• handle images (these can currently only appear in FAQs)

Bonus / maybe

• Time machine between versions
  • Navigate to previous / (next) version of the same data page
  • Nice-to-have: Time machine links across chart slug changes
• Other tasks
  • Strip out unnecessary JS code from the bundle (e.g. code for search, data catalog, homepage, etc.)

[marcelgerber]

Some discussion points from our kickoff discussion today: https://www.notion.so/owid/2025-01-16-Archival-grapher-embeds-kickoff-17d74b71f92e8061a201c7a0447e7a67?pvs=4