[Maf] MAF vs. MHTML

[Christopher Ottley]

tmm wrote:

> MAF sounds good, but is there anything wrong with using MHTML?

Nope.

> Though it comes from MS, and is designed for e-mail, it seems to be a 
> standard: IETF RFC standard 2557.
> Is there any reason why MHTML can't be cross-platform and cross-browser?

Nope.

> Does TBird (my e-mail client) use MHTML for sending HTML e-mails?

Nope. :). Close though, the eMail clients do MIME encode stuff, but as I 
found out after reading the spec, it's a little bit more than encoding 
some files and appending the result to the end of something.

MHTML is an encoding, not an archive. Because of this if you take a web 
page's elements and MHTML encode it, you'll end up with a file that is 
larger than the total size of the elements you started out with. MAF on 
the other hand basically zips the elements together meaning it will be 
the same size or smaller than the original total size of the elements. 
MAF can also allow for additional meta data to be added pretty easily 
and archives (because they are true archives) can be modified outside of 
Mozilla/Firefox. I haven't seen any MHTML "editors" out there. Adding 
meta-data or doing modifications by hand (for example using notepad) may 
work, but is tedious and error-prone. MAF also allows you to save 
multiple pages in the same archive, something which you'd have to really 
hack to fit into the MHTML spec. I know how to do it, it's just so ugly, 
it's not worth it. ;).

Regards,
Christopher.