MAFF (a shit-show, unsustained)
Firefox used to have an in-house format called MAFF (Mozilla Archive File Format), which boiled down to a zip file that had HTML and a tree of media. I saved several web pages that way. It worked well. Then Mozilla dropped the ball and completely abandoned their own format. WTF. Did not even give people a MAFF→mhtml conversion tool. Just abandoned people while failing to realize the meaning and purpose of archival. Now Firefox today has no replacement. No MHTML. Choices are:
- HTML only
- HTML complete (but not as a single file but a tree of files)
MHTML (shit-show due to non-portable browser-dependency)
Chromium-based browsers can save a whole complete web page to a single MHTML file. Seems like a good move but then if you open Chromium-generated MHTML files in Firefox, you just get an ascii text dump of the contents which resembles a fake email header, MIME, and encoded (probably base64). So that’s a show-stopper.
exceptionally portable approach: A plugin adds a right-click option called “Save page WE” (available in both Firefox and Chromium). That extension produces an MHTML file that both Chromium and Firefox can open.
PDF (lossy)
Saving or printing a web page to PDF mostly guarantees that the content and representation can reasonably be reproduced well into the future. The problem is that PDF inherently forces the content to be arranged on a fixed width that matches a physical paper geometry (A4, US letter, etc). So you lose some data. You lose information about how to re-render it on different devices with different widths. You might save on A4 paper then later need to print it to US letter paper, which is a bit sloppy and messy.
PDF+MHTML hybrid
First use Firefox with the “Save page WE” plugin to produce an MHTML file. But relying on this alone is foolish considering how unstable HTML specs are even still today in 2024 with a duopoly of browser makers doing whatever the fuck they want - abusing their power. So you should also print the webpage to a PDF file. The PDF will ensure you have a reliable way to reproduce the content in the future. Then embed the MHTML file in the PDF (because PDF is a container format). Use this command:
$ pdfattach webpage.pdf webpage.mhtml webpage_with_HTML.pdf
The PDF will just work as you expect a PDF to, but you also have the option to extract the MHTML file using pdfdetach webpage_with_HTML.pdf if the need arises to re-render the content on a different device.
The downside is duplication. Every image is has one copy stored in the MTHML file and another copy separately stored in the PDF next to it. So it’s shitty from a storage space standpoint. The other downside is plugin dependency. Mozilla has proven browser extensions are unsustainable when they kicked some of them out of their protectionist official repository and made it painful for exiled projects to reach their users. Also the mere fact that plugins are less likely to be maintained than a browser builtin function.
We need to evolve
What we need is a way to save the webpage as a sprawled out tree of files the way Firefox does, then a way to stuff that whole tree of files into a PDF, while also producing a PDF vector graphic that references those other embedded images. I think it’s theoretically possible but no tool exists like this. PDF has no concept of directories AFAIK, so the HTML tree would likely have to be flattened before stuffing into the PDF.
Other approaches I have overlooked? I’m not up to speed on all the ereader formats but I think they are made for variable widths. So saving a webpage to an ereader format of some kind might be more sensible than PDF, if possible.
(update) The goals
- Capture the webpage as a static snapshot in time which requires no network to render. Must have a simple and stable format whereby future viewers are unlikely to change their treatment of the archive. PDF comes close to this.
- Record the raw original web content in a non-lossy way. This is to enable us to re-render the content on different devices with different widths. Future-proofness of the raw content is likely impossible because we cannot stop the unstable web standards from changing. But capturing a timestamp and web browser user-agent string would facilitate installation of the original browser. A snapshot of audio, video, and the code (JavaScript) which makes the page dynamic is also needed both for forensic purposes (suitable for court) and for being able to faithfully reproduce the dynamic elements if needed. This is to faithfully capture what’s more of an application than a document.
wget -mpossibly satisfies this. But perhaps tricky to capture 3rd party JS without recursing too far on other links. - A raw code-free (thus partially lossy) snapshot for offline rendering is also needed if goal 1 leads to a width-constrained format. Save page WE and WebScrapBook apparently satisfies this.
PDF satisfies goal 1; wget satisfies goal 2; maff/mhtml satisfies goal 3. There is likely no single format that does all of the above, AFAIK. But I still need to explore these suggestions.
I archive with the WebScrapBook extension to htz which is also a zip based format. I open it with firefox’s built in method to open jar files like this: jar:file://${file}!/index.html
The fact that it is a zip based format makes it futureproof. I could as well unzip it and open it with any browser. You could probably open the maff files the same way, but I don’t think it is standardized to have an index.html file like htz.
AFAIK WARC is the only standard way of archiving webpages.
IIUC you are referring to this extension, which is Firefox-only (
likeunlike the save page WE, which has a Chromium version).Indeed the beauty of ZIP is stability. But the contents are not. HTML changes so rapidly, I bet if I unzip an old MAFF file it would not have stood the test of time well. That’s why I like the PDF wrapper. Nonetheless, this WebScrapBook could stand in place of the MHTML from the save page WE extension. In fact, save page WE usually fails to save all objects for some reason. So WebScrapBook is probably more complete.
(edit) Apparently webscrapbook gives a choice between htz and maff. I like that it timestamps the content, which is a good idea for archived docs.
(edit2) Do you know what happens with JavaScript? I think JS can be quite disruptive to archival. If webscrapbook saves the JS, it’s saving an app, in effect, and that language changes. The JS also may depend on being able to access the web, which makes a shitshow of archival because obviously you must be online and all the same external URLs must still be reachable. OTOH, saving the JS is probably desirable if doing the hybrid PDF save because the PDF version would always contain the static result, not the JS. Yet the JS could still be useful to have a copy of.
(edit3) I installed webscrapbook but it had no effect. Right-clicking does not give any new functions.
It saves the rendered page. It also has a built-in rough DOM editor so that you can edit the document before saving. The way I have it set up it up is to remove all javascript from pages.
In principle the ideal archive would contain the JavaScript for forensic (and similar) use cases, as there is both a document (HTML) and an app (JS) involved. But then we would want the choice whether to run the app (or at least inspect it), while also having the option to offline faithfully restore the original rendering. You seem to imply that saving JS is an option. I wonder if you choose to save the JS, does it then save the stock skeleton of the HTML, or the result in that case?
I just want to archive content, but if one would want such a thing I think the format to go for is WARC. As far as I understand it record the network requests, but I’m not sure as I’ve got no experience with the format at all. That way it would be possible to keep the original javascript intact and with a little manipulation of network requests to replay the original site.