What are web archives?

When I want to keep an interesting webpage, I use one of the provided AppleScripts to Add page from Safari or Add page from DevonThink. Because I’m worried that a page might beome unavailable on the internet, I usually take the trouble to go to DevonThink Pro later, Save as web archive, and delete the original page.

The other day, my network was offline most of the day, and I was very surprised to find that most of these web archives didn’t load. No harm done, because the next day when the network came back online everything was fine again. But it got me thinking that I must have totally misunderstood what a web archive is. Can anyone enlighten me? And is the only safe way to archive a web page to make a PDF of it?

There are several bugs in the WebKit related to loading web archives and therefore the WebKit does access the network sometimes although the resource is part of the web archive. However, the next release will hopefully be able to bypass these bugs (waiting for Apple to fix bugs is never a good idea :wink:).

That’s certainly good to know. I won’t panic and PDFize everything, then!