[Maf] Does MAF Archive Local Files??

[Angus Veitch]

Hi, this is my first post to this list, and I haven't read through the 
archives yet, so apologies if my issue has been raised before.

I find maf to be an indispensable part of Firefox.  Without it I would 
still be using M$ Internet Explorer.  Any extension for handling offline 
content is especially important because the offline cache in Ff still 
does not work properly.  Apart from the occasional page that maf won't 
save, I have had very few problems with the maf extension.  However, I 
have found one 'quirk' in it that worries me.  I discovered it while 
using maf in tandem with the Scrapbook extension, which is another 
useful method of capturing content and saving it locally.  I hope that 
what I describe here makes sense to people unfamiliar with Scrapbook.

I captured some pages with the Scrapbook extension and then used 
Scrapbook to export the captured pages to html.  I then opened the 
exported html and saved it as a maff file, assuming that all the related 
data for the page would be saved within the archive.  I then and 
proceeded to delete the original scrapbook files, thinking that they had 
all been duplicated in the archive (a bit hasty of me, I admit).  When I 
then tried to open the maff file, Firefox gave me a message saying that 
'index.html' in the scrapbook directory was not available.  In other 
words, it turned out that all of the relevant data had not been saved in 
the archive after all, as the archived files still contained links to 
other files on the hard drive (which I had now deleted).  As a result, I 
had to download the files again.  (I tried to recover the files, but 
strangely enough, two 'undelete' programs that I tried failed to find them.)

I don't know if this result is due to some peculiarity of Scrapbook, or 
of my combined use of the two extensions, or whether this is just the 
way maf works.  Either way, the main point I want to make is that all 
files associated with an archived web page should be contained within 
the archive file, even if the files being archived are local files (i.e. 
already on the hard drive).  An archive file should be completely 
self-contained.

Can someone explain to me what has happened here?  Did I do something 
illogical at some point?  Am I misunderstanding the way that maf is 
supposed to work?  Or is this a bug that I should report (or that has 
already been reported)?

Thanks.

Angus.