[Maf] Re: MAF project for Mozilla - MHT questions

[Christopher Ottley]

Mustafa Munawar wrote:

> Hi Christopher,
>
> I was just following your project concerning the MAF file extension 
> for Mozilla. It seems to be a wonderful idea. I haven’t actually 
> installed the plug-in nor do I know much about the multitudinous 
> plug-ins available for Mozilla--Mozilla is still relatively new to me. 
> Anyhow, I was wondering whether it be possible for you to answer some 
> questions that come to mind regarding your project:
>
> 1) Has the MAF extension been designed solely by you? If so, excellent 
> job.

Yes, and thank you. :). There are some MHT support utility functions 
that can be seen in the source which I credit the original author and 
URL. Other than that, all me.

> 2) Do you plan (or currently) allow MHT documents to be read using 
> this plug-in? Does this work functionally well?

Currently you can open most MHT documents and there should be no problem 
displaying the decoded page. I have found a bug in a decoding routine 
I'm using that should be fixed in the next CVS commit and the next 
stable release. If you have no idea what CVS is, just wait for the next 
packaged release.

> 3) Do you plan (or currently) allow MHT document to be saved in MHT 
> format?

I have done some work implementing the ability to save as MHT. I had 
planned to start implementing it for a later release, but given the 
interest in saving as MHT I decided to start a bit early. The next 
stable release should allow you to save as MHT.

> 4) How long (in months) do you think total MHT support (both 
> read/save) will take to complete?

This is a tricky question. MHT is a standards based format, RFC 2557 - 
MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate Documents, such as HTML (MHTML). It's 
very explicit in what should be supported. Before total MHT support can 
be implemented I'm aiming to support a subset that would make it 
compatible with documents produced by Internet Explorer's "Save as web 
page complete" code. Once that subset is complete, perhaps 2 to 3 months 
for the most to ensure it's totally standards compliant. Although the 
extra work to make it 100% standards compliant may not be something I 
do. I'll cross that bridge when I reach to it.

> 5) Isn’t promoting the MAF better than to promote the MHT format, so 
> why support MHT?

Good question. Although I consider MAF technically better, MHT is at 
this point more widespread. It's also an RFC standard. A quick look at 
my site statistics shows over 80% of the visitors on Windows. They 
probably have MHT archives dating back years and giving users a choice 
only helps my project. I see MHT as a good cross platform format to 
easily send an archive to someone who only has IE. If you want to save 
multiple web pages in an archive, compressed as a single file and chose 
the archive application to use, choose MAF.

> Thank you very much for your efforts as an Open Source developer and 
> for answering the above questions.
>
> Yours truly,
>
> Mustafa Munwar

Sure. Thanks for your interest. I cross posted this to the MAF 
discussion list. If you have any other questions or comments, subscribe 
to the list (http://maf.mozdev.org/list.html) and contact me there.
The next stable release wouldn't happen until firefox 0.9 final is out 
and I've had chance to test MAF on it. The installation API has changed, 
so current MAF XPIs wouldn't work on firefox.

Chris.