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

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Tyler Keating wrote:
> 
> Imagine this:  An HTML based document ZIP compressed into a single file could
> be uploaded as is to the server.  Clicking on a link to the file would
> probably download, decompress and open the file in the browser seamlessly and,
> even better, right-clicking on the link instead and choosing "Download Linked
> File" would download the same nice small single file.**

MHTML with a gzip transfer encoding seems like it would do this pretty 
nicely already, no?


On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> 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.

Indeed, this would belong in another specification.


On Tue, 17 Apr 2007, Jon Barnett wrote:
> 
> What place does HTML5 have in specifying one of these options as a 
> standard archive format?  Any?  A non-normative section on archives?

I don't think we really need to say anything in the spec -- it's a 
specification, not a position paper.


There was much discussion about this topic, but given that I think this is 
out of scope for HTML5 (and nobody seems to particularly disagree), I 
haven't responded. Let me know if I missed something that deserved a reply 
despite the foregoing.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'