More on the Wayback Machine
My second crawl, initiated yesterday, now shows up in the Wayback Machine, so I was able to test. The first thing I discovered was that a JavaScript hack whose objective is to work around IE's tendency to cache AJAX calls, by generating a random query-string to be appended to a URI, was causing those calls to fail, even though the file was actually there. This suggests that query strings generally may be an issue. In any case, since the purpose of a static site is to be static, there's probably no need to worry much about AJAX caching, so I've commented that bit out, and we'll see if the problem is solved on the next crawl.
However, a much bigger problem was also revealed: the Wayback Machine purposely mangles JavaScript, in rather nasty ways that ensure that (for instance) OpenLayers is completely broken. It does crude but understandable things like replacing URIs with Wayback-Machine versions of those URIs -- which itself is destructive, because it does this even for URIs used as namespaces. But even worse, it replaces calls to JavaScript functions with its own versions of those functions, even when they are functions called on objects about which it knows nothing. It replaced calls to postMessage with its own WB_PostMessage, causing the complete failure of the OL-based functionality for the gravure in the test site. I've posted a support request about this; at best, hopefully there's a way to prevent any mangling of specified JavaScript files; at worst, perhaps we can act as a test case for bug-fixing that code so it doesn't do this kind of damage.