Talk:ChiWriter

How to get a web page's own metadata from the Internet Archive?

The URL below provides the content of a page, as it stood at the time of archiving:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020131034708/https://www.horstmann.com/ChiWriter/

We can see that the page was archived in 2002. But what was the page's last modification time (mtime), at the time of archiving? HTTP provides this information via the "Last-Modified:" header field. The page at the URL above shows no HTTP headers. How do I get the field's value from archive.org? Do I need an account there? Do I need JavaScript?
— Black Walnut ^talk 01:03, 30 December 2025 (UTC)

@Black Walnut: Are you familiar with CURL? It has a --dump-header option which I used to save the headers of the archive page into a file, which includes the header:

x-archive-orig-last-modified: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 07:28:12 GMT

So I take it that when the archive crawled this page in January 2002, this was the Last-Modified header that it received.

curl output (external pastebin because I couldn't figure out how to dump it in a wiki reply) ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email · global) 02:03, 30 December 2025 (UTC)

Thank you so much Claudine! I understand now! You rock!
— Black Walnut ^talk 06:41, 30 December 2025 (UTC)

You're welcome! This led me to discover that Cay Horstmann's home page now links to this Wikipedia article instead of the deleted page on his own site, which is an interesting choice. ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email · global) 06:45, 30 December 2025 (UTC)

Huh! He orphaned his ChiWriter FAQ page! The page is still on the server and it isn't an island -- it's reachable through Wikipedia (and through Joop van den Eijnde's web page; maybe from others too) but... Huh! Yeah, that's messed up!
— Black Walnut ^talk 08:45, 30 December 2025 (UTC)