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

[Jonas Sicking]

Tyler Keating wrote:
> 
> On 16-Apr-07, at 3:03 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
>>
>> 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.
> 
> Okay.  I understand it now...  Thank you, you are right.  Before I get 
> out of here, whom do I bring this to instead?  I'm guessing it needs to 
> be the W3C Web Application Formats WG, but I'd like validation before I 
> start bugging them (if that's even possible).

I think this would be a good list, it just wouldn't be part of the 
webapps (html5) spec, but it would be a new whatwg spec.

I think a lot of work has been done in this area though, so you should 
research what's out there. We talked a bit about this for firefox 3, but 
I'm not sure what the latest word is with regards to if it's still in 
the plan or not.

Apples and operas widget formats would be a place to start looking. I 
think IE had some format as well. I know there are other things out 
there as well, but I can't remember them off the top of my head.

In any event, like Maciej, I think it would be great to have a cross 
browser format for this stuff.

/ Jonas