Mozilla Archive Format, with MHT and Faithful Save

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

by markling on April 15, 2015 · permalink

This is great in theory and quite nice in practice. But there's a major drawback.

When you save more than one tab into the same archive, it uses numbers to name the archive files for each tab. That makes looking at the archive very onerous. So onerous, in fact, that I'm having doubts about using the add-on at all.

E.g. I used MAFF to save 24 articles for a research project into the same archive file because they are all related. MAFF lets you name the archive container file. But it uses its own naming convention to name each of the saved pages in their own folder. So when you open the archive to look at a specific page, you get:

1429004035919_373
1429004035919_374
1429004035919_375
1429004035919_376
1429004035919_377
1429004035919_378
1429004035919_379
1429004035919_380
1429004035919_381
1429004035919_382
1429004035919_383
1429004035919_384
1429004035919_385
1429004035919_386
1429004035919_387
1429004035919_388
1429004035919_389
1429004035919_390
1429004035919_391
1429004035919_392
1429004035919_393
1429004035919_394
1429004035919_395

Each folder always contains the following files:

index_files
index.html
index.rdf

So if you want to find which of the number-named folders in your archive contains the page you are looking for, its like prospecting for oil. You have to dig open one file, then dig open its html file, to see if its the page you're looking for. Gagghhh!!!

The preferences dialogue allows you to specify that pages be saved using their given web page name. But this only applies in practive to the container file. It would help immensely if it also applied to the tabs. Better still if it could offer some intervening naming step where each page names can be manually edited and/or taken from a list of other page elements. Because some websites use the same generic page name for a variety of pages from the same parent - e.g. "Search Results".