[whatwg] Web Documents off the Web (was Web Archives)

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Apr 16, 2007, at 1:39 PM, Tyler Keating wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm bringing this up again with a different tact, because the more  
> that I think about it, the more I believe it has the ability to  
> significantly change the perception and application of HTML and I  
> would really like to keep the discussion alive.  In the previous  
> thread, I proposed a standard for archiving web sites into a single  
> ZIP archive with a unique file extension and although it didn't get  
> any outright negative feedback, it didn't drum up too much  
> excitement either.  If you can bear with me, I'd like to describe  
> the idea again in a slightly different light.

A cross-browser web archive format sounds like a useful thing.  
However, I don't think it should be part of or even tied to the HTML  
spec. In principle, such an archive could contain any browser- 
viewable content as the root document. This could be HTML, XHTML,  
SVG, generic XML, plain text, a raster image, or any number of other  
things. So such an archive format is logically a separate layer and  
should be specced as such.

Regards,
Maciej