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When you find a page - inherently a document-oriented term - like an article, blog post, how-to, or project writeup that's interesting or useful, and you want t
by LeifCarrotson 5y ago
When you find a page - inherently a document-oriented term - like an article, blog post, how-to, or project writeup that's interesting or useful, and you want to make sure it's available to you later, what do you do?
Do you save the HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and hope that it works offline? I used to use the "Save page as..." tool back in the early 2000s, but it's become less and less useful, with too many dysfunctional disappointments.
No, I cut out some junk I don't need with the Printliminator [1] bookmarklet, then I do a *print-to-PDF.* This gives me a file. I can save the file, back it up to my NAS, search for it later, keep it with other files from a project where it was useful, and otherwise hang onto it. This is so common, in fact, that it's gone from being an obscure thing you could do with a Postscript-to-PDF converter or (before the adware/Ask toolbar scandal) the installing the CutePDF virtual printer. Modern OSes bundle a PDF printer, and print dialogs understand that you want to "Save as PDF". Google Docs and Office 365 editors allow downloading a document as a PDF.
I totally agree that a dynamic, interactive page or a comment section is not compatible with this model of usage. There's a lot of consumption of endless feeds, and a lot of one-time video views that also don't make sense to save as offline files. However, the web for creators, where people write articles that are worth hanging onto, has a definite place for PDFs.
[1]: http://css-tricks.github.io/The-Printliminator/ http://css-tricks.github.io/The-Printliminator/
- derefr 5y ago> When you find a page [...] and you want to make sure it's available to you later, what do you do? Instead of doing a bad and lossy job of archiving the page myself, I notify† our friendly neighbourhood archivists at the Internet Archive of the page; and they then do the best, most lossless job of preserving the page that they're able, given their cumulative experience. † http://blog.archive.org/2017/01/25/see-something-save-something/ http://blog.archive.org/2017/01/25/see-something-save-someth... As a side-benefit, they also then take care of keeping the archive they've made around and available online in perpetuity, with no additional marginal effort on my part. The same can't be said for something in my own "private collection."
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago> in perpetuity Hopefully it really is around a very long time, but the world is unpredictable and things change. It's great to enhance the Internet Archive, but you can bet I'm keeping my local copy too. Just in case.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Santosh83 5y agoThere is value in having a personally curated, offline collection of documents. You can search, annotate or otherwise manipulate it to your heart's content, all without having to be connected. Of course the Internet Archive serves other purposes for which it is (currently) irreplaceable.
- htek 5y agoThat's subobtimal as well. The site could come out with a new robots.txt file which is just <code>User-agent: * Disallow: /</code> and everything already indexed by the Internet Archive is now inaccessible to you.
- daggersandscars 5y agoThis may not be well-known, but archive.org can and does remove pages / sites from the archive. Authors can request this, site owners (separate from the authors) can request this. There may be others who can request this. Just an FYI. If there are critical sites you want copies of, I'd recommend making your own copy. I've lost access to important pages / sites twice before taking this to heart. Edited for clarity
- blooalien 5y agoAlso useful: https://pypi.org/project/html2text/ https://pypi.org/project/html2text/
- jhgb 5y ago> Do you save the HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and hope that it works offline? I used to use the "Save page as..." tool back in the early 2000s, but it's become less and less useful, with too many dysfunctional disappointments. I'm too lazy, so I just tend to use SingleFile these days...
- gregsadetsky 5y agoThere was an interesting discussion about this a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228098 —— This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found interesting, sitting right there in a directory on my computer —— Including the suggestion that was brought up to use ripgrep to search in the pdf text content.
- anigbrowl 5y agoSometimes if I'm researching a topic I'll dig up a big number of newspaper articles and want to print them and read them away from the screen while scribbling notes etc, but on a lot of websites banner ads or footers with copyright statements can really mess it up.
- apotheon 5y agoI actually dislike HTML per se, but the only two benefits I see for PDFs in the general case are: - In my experience, it's a little harder and rarer to make PDFs utterly incompatible with different means of viewing them, and it generally requires more overt (if perhaps slightly unintentional, at times) sadism to make that happen. - PDFs can do some things HTML can't (easily, at least) with document design -- though those things are generally things that would be disallowed in our new "deurbanized" PDF-based web replacement. Everything else that comes to mind goes the other way, including the fact that the viewing-mechanism incompatibility thing can be even worse with PDFs, even if it's more rare for that to happen at present, and if PDFs became the new standard for the web I'm pretty sure that relative rarity would evaporate anyway. Let's also not forget that HTML can also do some things PDFs can't (as easily, at least) do.
- Bjartr 5y agoI've used chrome's ability to save a single .mhtml file that contains all the resources for this purpose in the past.