Missing Web browser feature

On Jul 12, 2006, at 4:30 PM, Phil Emery wrote:

> Reading about Opera 9's release made me think of the one great
> feature that I used all the time in IE - it's Scrapbook feature.
>
> Anyone know of a browser that has such a feature?

Nearly every browser--including IE 7 beta on Windows--saves "Web
Archives" or "HTML Complete" which I haven't played with. Finding
the files later would be aided by putting them all in a folder when
you save them. When I save an "HTML Complete" in Camino, I get an
HTML file and a similarly named folder with pieces. Double clicking
the HTML file opens it in Safari (on my machine--YMMV), and for the
particular page reveals a character set issue which seems to be
Camino's fault (non-breaking spaces encoded as entities in the
original page's source appear in Safari as upper case A with
circumflex--Camino does the same when I use Open With to cause Camino
to open the file).

Yojimbo will directly create a web archive in its collection of
stuff--individual pieces can then be dragged out to the desktop (or
presumably other places. Some of the other collection holders may do
so as well (I don't have current versions of any). By "directly" I
mean independent of browser--presumably using WebKit.

No, I don't know of a browser which puts access to the archives into
a sidebar as unhandy as old Mac IE's.

   --John

At 16:30 07/12/06 -0700, Phil Emery wrote:
>Anyone know of a browser that has such a feature?

Um ... yeah, Opera. Do File -> Save As, pick type HTML File With Images.
(I'm testing this under Windows, but Opera has always had equivalent
features on both platforms.) It does save style sheets as well as images.

It's not very convenient. You need to manually create a folder for each
saved page to avoid conflicts and just a general mess of files all stirred
together in a soup, since the files will mostly have their original names.
There's no indexing or even table-of-contents provision. But the redisplay
is reliable in my experience, though I haven't use it much.

ISTR that iCab has a similar feature. I'm not where I can test it.

It would be great to just have a single keystroke command to "Save in
archive", with useful automatic indexing and searching. Spotlight should
make this pretty easy.

Then there's Adam's old idea -- I think it's Adam's -- that the browser
should simply archive everything you ever view. Hey, disk is cheap, so why
take a chance on losing something. Of course, it's also possible to lose a
needle in a haystack, and such an archive could occasionally prove
embarrassing, or worse.

Edward

>Reading about Opera 9's release made me think of the one great
>feature that I used all the time in IE - it's Scrapbook feature.
>[...]
>Anyone know of a browser that has such a feature?

There's a Firefox extension called ScrapBook that adds a scrapbook to Firefox.

Brian

I use File->Save As... in Safari and use web archive format. The
saved file will only open in Safari, but all graphics and links are
there. Alternatively, and, usually even better, I use the 'Mail
Contents of This Page' item to send it in Email. Apple mail shows the
full, live page and the mail time stamp provides a great log
reference for receipts that I would otherwise print.

Alan Forkosh Oakland, CA
aforkoshmac.com

At 4:30 PM -0700 12/7/06, Phil Emery wrote:
>Reading about Opera 9's release made me think of the one great
>feature that I used all the time in IE - it's Scrapbook feature.
>
>Blog articles might not necessarily last forever so it was nice to be
>able to "grab" a webpage with all it's graphics and formatting and
>have it always on hand for future browsing. So far, no other browser
>has implemented this, as far as I know.
>
>Anyone know of a browser that has such a feature?

Flock is turning out to be a nice little browser. It has a Web
Snippets feature where you can drag text to the Snippets icon at the
bottom of the window, or Control click and choose Send to Web
snippets.

In the past I used to do something similar to what you describe with
StickyBrain. It's possible that Soho Notes (that has taken over from
StickyBrain) may do that but the new software hasn't played nice on
my MacBook Pro since I installed it a couple of days ago, so I can't
test it.

You may also find that something like Yojimbo or VooDooPad would do
the trick, but I haven't tried them lately.

Cheers,

Miraz
--
Writer Web-Designer Learner
Latest book: WordPress 2 : Visual QuickStart Guide
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321450191

MacTips.Info: http://mactips.info
Blog, Mac Tips Archive, Learning Centre
iName: http://public.xdi.org/=miraz

There is a product called Webstractor which can grab whole web pages,
then you can turn it into editable copy if you want. You can also set
it to update regularly and if it does so, it creates a whole new web
page so you don't miss anything that mgiht have been amended later.

IMHO it is better than the IE scrapbook. You can have separate
documents with different things, and once a page is in Webstractor
you can click on a link and you can choose whether to have it added
to that webstract doc or not. When you want that page again just
click on the link and it will go to the Webstracted page, and not try
to open it again from the Web.

http://www.softchaos.com/

But the most frustrating aspect of saving websites for almost all
browers is that unless you save the Whole page in the folder mode,
you don't maintain the URL. MOST aggravating. The only browser which
does have that ability is iCab that I'm aware of. Something in OS X
evidently prohibited the older GREAT ability in OS 9 of having the
URL automatically put in the Comments section of Cmd-I.

Anyone know of an extension or whatever for Firefox that will do this
job on Save html?
ss

"Alternatively, and, usually even better, I use the 'Mail Contents of This Page' item to send it in Email"

Interesting! This gave me the idea of setting up a gMail account just for this purpose, to give me a searchable archive. I just tried it a moment ago -- unfortunately, IE6/Outlook on a PC sends the page as an attachment, and Gmail doesn't search attachments (grr). But when I get home I am going to try this with Safari and Firefox.

- Alaska Jack

On Jul 13, 2006, at 10:28 AM, Edward Reid wrote:
> Then there's Adam's old idea -- I think it's Adam's -- that the
> browser should simply archive everything you ever view. Hey, disk
> is cheap, so why take a chance on losing something. Of course, it's
> also possible to lose a needle in a haystack, and such an archive
> could occasionally prove embarrassing, or worse.

For that check out BrowseBack <http://www.smileonmymac.com/browseback/
index.html>. It can save PDF's of the page, but it can also save the
page with images if you select that option. It runs in the
background and caches everything that the browsers are looking at.
You can select which browsers it watches. It can also import history
from the browsers to initialize its cache, and if you don't start it
right away, it will catch up when you do.

Geoff
.

Just another note about the whole subject:

I doubt there are copyright issues involved in making archives *for
personal use* of visited web pages.

There would be copyright issues with other uses--particularly
commercial. That is, Adam would have to be careful about taking
material saved by his hypothetical "archive every page I visit"
browser and including it in TidBITS. (He would have to obtain
permission, or know that some page (probably top of site) made
everything subject to one of the Creative Commons licenses, or
something similar. He would perhaps also look at the META tags on
the saved page.)

Google so far isn't having huge issues so far with their page
archiving. But Google's lawyers are bigger than the lawyers working
for anyone reading this. And Google removes pages from their archive
when convinced to.

   --John

Firefox doesn't let you send whole pages -- only links -- but I have verified that you can use safari to send whole pages, via Apple Mail, to a Gmail account, then use Gmail's search to search through your collection. Like I said before, interesting! I am going to try that system for a while to see how it works.

- Alaska Jack

At 4:30 PM -0700 7/12/06, Phil Emery wrote:
>Reading about Opera 9's release made me think of the one great
>feature that I used all the time in IE - it's Scrapbook feature.
>
>Blog articles might not necessarily last forever so it was nice to
>be able to "grab" a webpage with all it's graphics and formatting
>and have it always on hand for future browsing. So far, no other
>browser has implemented this, as far as I know.
>
>Anyone know of a browser that has such a feature?

I do this all the time with Devon Agent. It acts as a pretty good web
browser, and will archive a page or a selection of a page directly
into Devon Think.

HTH,

Dan O'Donnell


--
"Dora was everything that a surfer ought to be: he was tanned; he was
good looking; he was trouble. Dora was a Kerouac in shorts."
- obit for Miki Dora, London Times, 2002

At 5:23 PM -0700 7/13/06, Sharon Stevenson wrote:
>But the most frustrating aspect of saving websites for almost all
>browers is that unless you save the Whole page in the folder mode,
>you don't maintain the URL. MOST aggravating. The only browser which
>does have that ability is iCab that I'm aware of. Something in OS X
>evidently prohibited the older GREAT ability in OS 9 of having the
>URL automatically put in the Comments section of Cmd-I.

At 5:23 PM -0700 7/13/06, anjtc wrote:
>Interesting! This gave me the idea of setting up a gMail account
>just for this purpose, to give me a searchable archive. I just tried
>it a moment ago -- unfortunately, IE6/Outlook on a PC sends the page
>as an attachment, and Gmail doesn't search attachments (grr). But
>when I get home I am going to try this with Safari and Firefox.


Devon Agent.

Not sure if somebody's mentioned this already (I'm way behind on reading
Tidbits Talk) but both Yojimbo and SOHO Notes allow you to print a PDF
directly into their database. I typically use this for printing receipts
on web pages into SOHO Notes, but it should work with just about any
website. If the website has a page print version you can use that and get
no ads and everything on one page.

The PDFs are searchable.

Kevin

Re: Browseback

Do read the comments on Browseback on VersionTracker. Quite a few users have complained that it is a system resource hog and can slow things down quite a bit. Unlike Webstractor, Browseback saves EVERYTHING.

George Slusher Eugene, OR

>Re: Browseback
>
>Do read the comments on Browseback on VersionTracker. Quite a few users
>have complained that it is a system resource hog and can slow things
>down quite a bit. Unlike Webstractor, Browseback saves EVERYTHING.

I have it and used it for a while. But it slowed things (safari) down
enormously. Now that it is universal and I have MacBook, I might try
it again. But I am wary.

--
=alex hoffman