WEBSITE HISTORY

tracking changes in administrative policy

An individual may wish to see the history of a certain webpage for any number of reasons. For example, practitioners may wish to see the evolution of CRA commentary on their webpages to understand changes to administrative policy. That is, to compare current to prior published guidance.

Some online CRA resources, such as the Folios, identify the changes made to webpages, however, many webpages will simply identify that they have been updated but will not explicitly state what has been changed. Without the webpage or entity self-reporting the updates, identifying the changes can be difficult. However, there are a number of tools available on the Internet that may be useful in piecing together a webpage’s historical data. These tools, such as https://archive.org/web/, essentially record what a webpage looked like at various moments in time. This can enable users to see how a webpage has changed over time. These tools aim to maintain an archive of the entire web.

In addition to the above tool which can be used for any webpage, as noted in VTN 427(1), online content referred to in the Supreme Court of Canada decisions will now be hosted at http://www.scc-csc.ca/cso-dce/list-liste-eng.aspx.

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