Okay, been posting here and there but I thought a thread would be better suited.
There’s some agreement on the forums that web clipping in DT is not ideal especially compared to the leader, Evernote. But EN uses proprietary technology that they have developed and researched for many years, and the DT team has better to do than spend time into developing such a custom solution.
Webarchives are the current solution if you want to preserve a web page’s formatting, but the format has many disadvantages:
Proprietary format not working outside of Safari
Will load external content if the code says so, leading to long-term archiving or even privacy problems
Not working behind paywalls
The SingleFile format would solve the issues from what I can see: it grabs media content and encodes it in base64 format in a single html page which can be rendered statically in anything that can view html. Best of all, it’s open source:
There are extensions for every browser save Safari and a CLI tool to save pages in that format. I believe it would be a tremendous addition to DEVONthink both on desktop and mobile, allowing for long-term archiving, with a standard format, needing minimal development time since all the tools already exist.
Interesting. However note the embedding of base64 data in the HTML could create a file larger than 10MB. Due to memory consumption issues in iOS, that is the size limit for HTML and formatted notes in DEVONthink To Go.
Many webarchives are loading content dynamically. And while I can’t expound on the technicalities, many webarchives are still linking data, not embedding the images.
Thanks for the answer. Well, that’s all the more case for having SingleFile… and if that makes too large files for DTTG, that’s one more limitation of iOS.
I remember a few days ago when you reminded me to try SingleFile, and it really is impressive! It’s very elegant, very neat. @BLUEFROG mentions that SingleFile may has a problem with excessive memory consumption in iOS. But I work mostly on a Mac, after all, for now, the laptop is the real productivity tool. So the flaws don’t hide it!
Forgive me, I don’t know how to invoke services directly with Applescript, and how to pass the filtered file to Applescript. Hopefully the following steps will inspire you, or my steps won’t work.
But if you just want to move the HTML file into DEVONthink folder, then things are much simpler. I’m stuck on how to invoke the “Add to DEVONthk” service.
Thank you! I was thinking along those lines, but I was thinking maybe you had a way to create SingleFiles without resorting to another browser then Safari. (Wish there was at least an extension for that… getting outside to Firefox in order to save them is a pain.)
I see what you mean, I’m guessing you use Safari as your primary browser. My main browser is Chrome. So, for me, as soon as Chrome generates SingleFile, it automatically adds to DT, which achieves a similar experience to the DT Chrome extension.
But people aren’t very enthusiastic about developing Safari extensions, and even if they are willing to do, they charge for them. I don’t use Safari just because of the lack of extensions.
