Comment by jml7c5
1 year ago
I really wish that browsers had developed first-class support for offline web page bundles. There's no way to share a page that is guaranteed to be self-contained and not hit the network, especially if you want to use javascript. It's particularly frustrating since browsers supported offline mode as far back as the 90s; it just needed to be combined with support for loading from zipped folders.
That simple change would've largely solved the academic paper problem decades ago. It's bizarre that it still isn't a feature.
Mail clients kinda do that (or at least they can, if asked to). Also, why would academic papers need JS anyway? CSS and images, I can get, but beyond that there's no need for anything fancier.
One option her is to inline all assets - images etc - as bas64 URIs. The HTML page ends up huge but it will at least be self-contained.
Yes, but it's not guaranteed to be self-contained. I wouldn't want to open a random HTML file knowing that it could phone home, or that the content might break one day without me realizing. There's a practical and psychological aspect to sharing `steves_paper_2014.html` versus `steves_paper_2014.offlinesitebundle`. The latter feels safe and immutable.
What you want is an HTML tag or response header that restricts network access, which the browser can then enforce. Offline or a list of allowed domains, this would be great for security in general. Not so great for advertisers though.
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this is what you are looking for i believe (web archive format) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WARC_(file_format)?oldformat=t...
Browsers don't have native support for opening WARC. It doesn't solve the safety problem either: you can still construct a WARC that phones home, AFAIK.
It's a great format for the problem it solves, but if browsers supported offline-only files the container format wouldn't (and shouldn't) need to be that complicated.