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 an MHTML file 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 shit-show too.

exceptionally portable approach: A Firefox plugin adds a right-click option called “Save page WE”. 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 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, if possible.

  • evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
    0·
    6 days ago

    It’s perhaps the best way for someone that has a good handle on it. Docs say it “sets infinite recursion depth and keeps FTP directory listings. It is currently equivalent to -r -N -l inf --no-remove-listing.” So you would need to tune it so that it’s not grabbing objects that are irrelevent to the view, and probably exclude some file types like videos and audio. If you get a well-tuned command worked out, that would be quite useful. But I do see a couple shortcomings nonetheless:

    • If you’re on a page that required you to login to and do some interactive things to get there, then I think passing the cookie from the gui browser to wget would be non-trivial.
    • If you’re on a capped internet connection, you might want to save from the brower’s cache rather that refetch everything.

    But those issues aside I like the fact that wget does not rely on a plugin.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
      0·
      6 days ago

      I find that the things most likely to disappear (like a tinkerer’s web 1.0 homepage) tend to have limited recursion depth anyway.

      A Tumblr blog takes an awfully long time to crawl politely, IIRC, but the end result wasn’t too big on disk. Now I’m wondering how you would pass a cookie to wget, and how you might set a data cap so you can stop and wait for the month to be up before you call it again. I kind of feel like I’ve done a cookie before to get around a captcha or something…

      • evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
        0·
        6 days ago

        wget has a --load-cookies file option. It wants the original Netscape cookie file format. Depending on your GUI browser you may have to convert it. I recall in one case I had to parse the session ID out of a cookie file then build the expected format around it. I don’t recall the circumstances.

        Another problem: some anti-bot mechanisms crudely look at user-agent headers and block curl attempts on that basis alone.

        (edit) when cookies are not an issue, wkhtmltopdf is a good way to get a PDF of a webpage. So you could have a script do a wget to get the HTML faithfully, and wkhtmltopdf to get a PDF, then pdfattach to put the HTML inside the PDF.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
          0·
          6 days ago

          Ah, looks like you beat my edit by a few seconds.

          Good to know about the Netscape thing. It looks like Firefox (still, being a successor to NS) does it that way, and Chrome can do it that way. If you’re using a true third option you probably don’t need my help.

          For the sake of completeness, on Tor Browser you have to copy the SQLite database from the browser directory, since it’s too locked down to just export the normal way. Then I’d try just subbing it in on an offline Firefox instance and proceeding the normal way. And obviously, use wget over torsocks as well.