Hi,
I apologize if I've missed this in the specification or mailing
archives, but I have a suggestion related to standardizing web
"archives" in HTML5. Currently, I know that Firefox uses Mozilla
Archive Format (.maf), Internet Explorer and Opera use MIME HTML
(.mht) and Safari uses its own format (.webarchive) for saving a web
page and all of its resources into a single file. So clearly a
standard would be beneficial in ensuring "archive" compatibility
between browsers and I think it's suitable for that standard to
reside in HTML5.
I don't believe this would be very difficult to standardize and the
solution may be nothing more than a collection of random files
wrapped into a ZIP compressed archive with a unique extension similar
to a JAR or ODF file. The unique extension would be recognized by
browsers, email clients and editors, which could then extract and
display the root file directly (ex. index.html). The root file would
obviously contain relative URIs to any other HTML, JavaScript, CSS,
images and other files in the archive so the internal structure may
not be important and the browser would not need any new rules to
interpret individual files once it has uncompressed the archive into
memory. This would facilitate passing HTML based documents around
that could be viewed with any browser, yet appear as a small single
file.
-Tyler
- [whatwg] Web Archives Tyler Keating
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