[whatwg] Web Archives

[Michael A. Puls II]

On 4/11/07, Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au> wrote:
> Michael A. Puls II wrote:
> > It's a really good way to archive, but IE won't handle it and most
> > plug-ins don't accept data URIs, so there are problems with that
> > use-case. (unless browsers can help with that in a secure way.)
> >
> > I made a suggestion about this on the Opera forums a while ago when
> > Opera didn't even support .mht.
> > <http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=72718>
> > (The actual working example links are broken, but the idea was..)
>
> So because data URIs are unsupported by IE and MHT isn't supported by
> some others, you propose this new feature which is equally unsupported
> all browsers?

If IE supported data URIs, I still don't think HTML + data URIs would
be the best format for archiving. (Just saying that if IE did, we
could use HTML + data URIs now for *some* archiving situations, but
there'd still be problems with plug-ins and data bloat from encoding
the resources.)

If every browser supports .mht, I still don't think it's the best
format for archiving.

I suppose if I could (outside of a browser) select index.html and all
its files, right-click and choose "Generate .mht file from selection"
and do the opposite of "generate files from .mht file" to get the
original content  back, it might be better and feel more like a zip
archive. However, even then, I don't think generating a mail message,
possibly using quoted printable and a  bunch oh headers is the best
way to archive an html page and its content.

What I do think is that the mozila archive format or something like
the widget packaging Karl mentioned
<http://www.w3.org/TR/WAPF-REQ/#requirements_packaging>  would be a
better format for archiving.

So, yes, in that I'm suggesting something else that may not be
supported much or at all yet, but not  because of current support with
other formats.

-- 
Michael