Mozilla Archive Format, with MHT and Faithful Save

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

by smonsarr on Oct. 19, 2017 · permalink

The MAFF Firefox extension was developed to enable saving web pages, mainly for archiving purposes. This it did extremely well due to the zipped MAFF format that contained all the different files that make up a web page in a single file. A web page can, and generally is, a very complex and messy collection of completely different file types (HTML, CSS, Javascript, images, video). Saving all these files in their original format and "messing" with the original HTML as little as possible made the restitution as close as possible to the original.
"Replacement" extensions such as "Save Page WE" are completely useless, no they do not work nearly as well as MAFF because they simply technically cannot, it is totally ridiculous to think that any web page can be inlined into a single HTML file this has never worked and will never work because of the inherently complex nature of the different components of a web page.

The MAFF format brought something else : a standalone archive format for web pages that actually worked. One can, and people do, create MAFF files form scratch that contain mini web sites that can be viewed offline and shared in a simple single file format that is easily opened in Firefox (if only other browsers had supported MAFF)

A standalone archive format is an important privacy feature that you MUST promote against the Google point of view.
Without MAFF, there is no simple way to exchange web content and we are forced to use sharing platforms and feed their big-datas...
It is shameful that a standard for a standalone Web Archive Format does not exist. Please work on it..