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

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On May 5, 2007, at 10:27 AM, Ben Ward wrote:

> On 16 Apr 2007, at 22:03, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>> A cross-browser web archive format sounds like a useful thing
>
> From a purely practical perspective, surely support for the data:  
> URI format solves this problem? The user-agent's ‘Save as Web  
> Archive’ function would encode each external resource and replace  
> each external src="" and href="" target with a data: URI.
>
> This creates a single file web page, with all resources, that can  
> be opened in any other user agent that supports data.
>
> Is there a strong need for a more complex format than that?

This doesn't address resource load requests made from JavaScript.  
(For example: setting img.src, setting iframe.src, making an  
XMLHttpRequest, using new Image(), using location.replace(), etc). In  
general it might not even be possible to transform the code to change  
URI references in JavaScript, since they may be concatenated from  
multiple strings or otherwise computed at runtime.

data: is also a pretty inefficient encoding for large chunks of  
binary data like images and videos.

Regards,
Maciej