Encapsulated HTML file

I don't always get the time to read a file while I am online.
Also, I would like to take a few pages home to read, where I
don't have an internet connection. Some sites offer PDF files,
but that means that you need an acrobat viewer and they usually
take up much more room than you average html and links alternative.
This is where the idea of a encapsulated web page comes in. By
being able to have the ability to have an encapsulated web page,
a site could quite easily allow you to download the whole
document.

Since I don't want to go around reinventing the wheel (computer
industry favourite), I feel that the best thing is to use what
already exists. What already exists is the unix tar file format.
Since this is not a compressed archive there is a reduced amount
of time getting a specific file from an archive. The way I see
the archive being layed out it with two items at the top level,
a special index file and a folder representing the root of the
file with a index.html file being the first file read. The other
advantage of having an encapsulated html file is to do with file
names. Since the file name within the file are not constrained by
the rules governing the local filing system, the file names are
not mangled, such as in dos. Also to help systems that recognise
files by file endings, I would propose an ending like .eht or
something.

If anyone feels like this is a good idea, then I would like to
develop it further and together with someones help propose it
as an internet draft or something.

Andre-John

Received on Monday, 30 December 1996 10:27:19 UTC