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Comment by maxloh | Hacker News Reader

Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc.) already have great MHTML support. Just right click on a page > "Save as...", and select "Webpage, Single File" in the dialog.

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Because having just an html file can just be simpler and html files are more ubiquitously rendered. Personally having a single html file with base64 encoded images embedded into it serves 99.9% of what I usually want to do when wanting to have a webpage saved offline. Such a file can be eg be put in my dropbox and rendered in dropbox web interface which makes it easy to share with others.

I have actually made a script that looks for image tags in an html file on my computer, looks in the local directory location for them and base64 embeds them in the html file itself, so this seems to simplify the process.

If that's all you want then couldn't you just print to PDF?

It's not responsive anymore

Because I do not want a page structure in the document. Images are arranged better in an html file because a pdf would have to arrange things into pages and thus create undesirable gaps or put images in weird ways. Plus html is just a text file I can further edit if I want.

I was just going to ask why this was better than just saving an MHTML file in the browser.

Because the MHTML format produced by Chromium can almost be considered as proprietary.

That's not correct. MHTML has been defined as internet standard since 1999. MHTML has been an internet standard since 1999, with support dating back to IE 5.0.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2557

I'm actually referring to the "set of modifications" described here [1] and the fact that only Chromium can open (these) MHTML files today.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FvmYUC0S0BkdkR7wZsg0hLdK...

Good to know that!

Are you meaning that these modifications cause the generated MHTML files to become non-standards-compliant?

I wouldn't consider them proprietary though. At least the primary software used to open these files, Chromium, is open-source software.

I agree that it's debatable, which is why I used the word “almost” ;). The fact remains that this info isn't in RFCs and is hard to find on the web.

It seems that Firefox doesn't support saving a page as MHTML yet.

Maybe that's the reason.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/add-support-of-mhtml-fo...

Also it doesn’t quite fully save all of the assets, like fonts if it were referenced in CSS files

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