I don’t have the specific document handy but .webarchives are likely to continue working for the foreseeable future. They have been around a long time and the wheels of development move slowly on such matters. Look how long 32-bit support was threatened to be removed.
Also, there are recent APIs from Apple that are for webarchive creation, so who can really tell what Apple is up to?
I couldn’t find them. And since the class itself is marked as deprecated, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to provide APIs to create objects of this class recently. Which does not mean that Apple is above doing things that do not make sense, of course.
Regardless of that: Webarchives were, afaik, only used in the Appleverse. Ever. Which makes them a tiny bit proprietary, I’d say. As opposed to formatted notes (which browsers can display, I think), MD or PDF.
Indeed, webarchives are not cross-platform and made at a time when fueding with Micro$oft was going strong. Much less compulsion to play nice in those days.
Rich text, formatted notes, Markdown (/biased), and PDF are the front runners nowadays.
I’ve taken a hard stance (personally) on keeping everything in plain text (or markdown) and using PDFs just to be as future proof. Even pulled all the M$ files out of my DT databases. DT is much faster and happier because of it (most likely placebo effect).
Select ObjC one level up, then go down again. That’ll actually show the completion handler as an ObjC block. But then you can’t change the language back to Swift on this level…
Yeah, i guess what I was trying to get near was that I’d like to know from Apple if they are ever planning on making it impossible to view webarchives. I’m perfectly comfortable continuing to create them knowing that creating them may be something i can only do for a few more years, as long as I can continue to view them for the rest of my life.
WebArchive itself seems like a concept that Apple is still intending to express so hopefully even with the deprecation of that specific class, the concept will live on and they will remain openable at least until my death.
I’m not sure how old you are, but I’m old enough to remember being told that a number of formats (software and hardware) would last a “lifetime” … yet, here we are in my twilight years and my children have no idea about those now-dead formats. In other words, things change and it’s impossible to predict the future, really.
Go with what works for you now and then in a few years if you have stuff that is in some technology that looks to being usurped and you need the material … move it.
If you really want to get into this long-term-saving-of-stuff technology … I think the US Library of Congress (and many others) have done a lot of research, publications, and actions, to do what they think needs to be done. Even they over the years have changed their mind, I would guess.
High quality paper seems to have lasted hundreds/thousands of years. We don’t do paper any more. Future archeologists just might not even know we existed.
I work on medieval manuscripts. 600-900 year old parchment leaves will absolutely outlast the tens of thousands of digital photographs of those manuscripts that I have taken for convenience. Archival digitization by libraries is a different matter, but my money would still be on the books themselves.