- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 13 May 2008 09:55:53 +0000 (UTC)
On Wed, 11 Apr 2007, Tyler Keating wrote: > > 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. There are some specifications for this kind of thing already, e.g. multipart/related (RFC2387), and the derivative MHTML (RFC2557). In HTML5, this can be somewhat achieved using the offline application cache feature, with a cache manifest. But the right solution to address the problems with MHTML are to develop a new RFC that addresses the problems with MHTML, IMHO. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 13 May 2008 02:55:53 UTC