[Camino] Re: saving the URL

[Smokey Ardisson]

At 7:51 PM +0100 on 4/3/06, Ruth Rickard wrote:

>From Ricky:
>
>>https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=154580
>>
>:)
>
>I looked through this bug comment list - not quite sure if I 
>understood what was going on - but it seems people wanted this 
>feature some years ago but that idea seems to have faded from the 
>scene. Is that right?

Well, it's still on the top of my list (though I can't program, but 
it is being worked on) because it gives me the ability to reference 
the URL (and in most cases, date accessed/downloaded) for citation 
and such ;)  I currently switch to another browser when I know I need 
to do that....

>My friend responded to Ricky's post with the following, which I 
>quote below in case it throws some more light on what he wants, for 
>which someone here may have a solution.
>
>Ruth

[...]

>>Firefox (normal version, not using Scrapbook) does have one 
>>advantage over Explorer when it comes to saving pages. If you save 
>>a page in Firefox, it saves all the associated files in a folder 
>>rather than in an archive file like Explorer. This means that if 
>>you want to get at a picture or mp3 file associated with a page, 
>>you can do it. With Explorer, you have to save it separately, and 
>>this isn't always possible (particularly with mp3 files).

Ah, your friend wants some sort of "web archive" function, as offered 
by MacIE, iCab, and now Safari.  We have bugs on this, too ;) (mostly 
in the "Core" product because they require some architecture changes 
at low levels).

However, Camino can already save pages just like Firefox ("If you 
save a page in Firefox, it saves all the associated files in a 
folder") by choosing "HTML Complete" from the little drop-down in the 
Save dialogue.

Personally, I detest HTML Complete because it insists on rewriting 
links/URLs inside the files, but it never manages to rewrite all of 
them correctly, so on any page beyond a certain level of complexity, 
you don't actually have a full, working copy.  And it doesn't really 
create an archive, just a collection of files and folders you still 
have to keep track of and move/rename in relation to each other.

Not having seen the Safari 2 or Konqueror archives, unfortunately, my 
personal favorite of actual archive formats is the iCab archive 
format.  It's a standard ZIP file, so you can easily extract one or 
more files from it or move it to another computer or OS even and 
still have a complete archive that can be useful even without iCab. 
It doesn't rewrite links, so you have an honest-to-(deity) archive of 
what's there, and in most of the cases I've tried, it actually works 
as a "live" offline browseable archive even on fairly complex sites. 
There are two quirks to the implementation that I don't like, but 
they are trivially changed if the format were ever to be implemented 
in other browsers....

Anyway, that's more than you wanted to know, but hopefully the 
saving-the-URL-in-the-comments is coming sooner rather than later, 
and "HTML Complete" pseudo-archives are available now, warts and all 
;)

Smokey
-- 
Smokey Ardisson
Graduate Student in Middle Eastern and African History
Georgetown University
alqahira at mindspring.com
http://www.geocities.com/sardisson/