February 28, 2006

Good web browsers allow you to save a web page to your hard drive. Since a web page is often made from many separate files (HTML, images, stylesheets, JavaScript, Flash), for the saved page to be useful, the browser needs to stash all of those pieces somehow, and automatically edit the HTML to use the stashed pieces instead of fetching the pieces from the web site. Some browsers (IE, Firefox) can save a web page as a collection of files, but this can be cumbersome to store and send via e-mail. Some browsers (IE, Safari) can save a web page as a single file (or something that can be manipulated like a single file), but the file is usually in a proprietary format that requires the same browser to view. When tossing information around to other people, some people resort to PDFs as a way to keep text and images together in a single file.

Unipage Unifier is a free utility that saves a web page, and all its bits, as a single file that can be viewed with any web browser. It supports JavaScript functionality (not available in a PDF), and even embedded Flash animations.

comments...

Charles, February 28, 2006 9:37 AM:

Actually, the Safari storage format .webarchive is not proprietary, there is even an open source conversion tool that can expand .webarchive files into a standard HTML plus attached images & etc.
Check out the command line app "textutil".

Dan Sanderson, February 28, 2006 9:47 AM:

That's great, though what I meant by proprietary is that it cannot be read natively by other browsers, such that you could easily send a "complete" web page to non-Mac people as a single file. You can supposedly do this with Unipage.

It's an improvement if you assume the advantage is that the complete web page can be tossed around as a single file, and that it's more convenient for the originator to run a tool to produce the file, as opposed to the recipient having to run a tool to view it.