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That's exactly what the parent is criticizing. The problem with save page is that the HTML you save still contains tons of links to server resources, particular
by oconnor663 6y ago
That's exactly what the parent is criticizing. The problem with save page is that the HTML you save still contains tons of links to server resources, particularly CSS and JS. Of course those links will work if you look at the saved page immediately after you save it. The problem is that if you come back later, sometimes even just the next day, they no longer work. A lot of JS file names are auto-generated random numbers, produced by packaging systems rather than humans, which change whenever the developers edit their JS. They aren't designed to be stable.
There are tools that try to fetch those links and update the HTML to point to the local copy. But those tools can only go so far. JS is allowed to fetch new files dynamically, and there's no reliable way to look at a piece of code and automatically figure out what it's going to fetch when you run it.
- kindofastrawman 6y ago> JS is allowed to fetch new files dynamically, and there's no reliable way to look at a piece of code and automatically figure out what it's going to fetch when you run it. You've diverged from the context and are no longer doing an apples-to-apples comparison. The things you're describing are all opt-in and amount to having to deal with an adversarial input. There's nothing inherent to the medium that requires those things. In other words, a person publishing a PDF is already abstaining from certain things. (Namely, the sorts of things you're bringing up that would make for a pathological case.) If the person who publishes a PDF does a straightforward translation into a web page, then you end up with something that doesn't exhibit any of the downsides you're discussing.
- oconnor663 6y agoGood point, and also relevant user name :)
- anoncake 6y agoNo, but the medium allows these things. And that's a problem.
- kevincox 6y agoNo, most browsers will save the resources as well and rewrite the HTML to reference them. You can have problems with dynamically loaded things but I have found that it works very well in practice. I have had maybe one page that was significantly broken saving from Firefox over the years.
- znpy 6y agoThanks dude, it's nice to see that there still arr people that can read a text and understand the point.