Webarchive

WebArchive is both:

• a file format for rich web content
• a class within a software framework.

WebArchive: the format

A WebArchive object contains the main resource, as well as the subresources and subframes of the main resource. The main resource can be an entire webpage, a portion of a webpage, or some other kind of data such as an image.

Supporting applications, classes, commands and operating systems

• Bean word processor
• Devonthink Information Manager
• Journler notebook and information manager
• Mac OS X
• OmniWeb browser
• Safari version 1 and later in Mac OS X
• Safari version 4 and later for Windows
• Sunrise open source browser
• WebKit nightly builds
• Yojimbo information organiser.

Screen shots

• A Finder Open With contextual menu for a .webarchive
• [more from the same gallery http://www.wuala.com/grahamperrin/public/2009/06/25/webarchive/]

Conversions

A .webarchive file is typically saved as a binary property list using NSKeyedEncoder.^{[citation needed]}

Binary to XML, XML to binary

• plutil property list utility in Mac OS X 10.2 and later
• plutil.pl — a Perl implementation of plutil for Linux and Windows.

WebArchive to files

• Evernote
• Web Archive Extractor application and Automator action for Mac OS X

WebArchive to PDF

• Download URLs as PDFs Automator action for Mac OS X

WebArchive to KDE WAR

• Webarcher

Opening .webarchive files: hints

On Windows:

• if a received .webarchive is not associated with a supporting application, drag the file to a window of the application
• you may opt to always open .webarchive files with a preferred application, such as Safari.

Microsoft Office Word 2007 can open a WebArchive file, and save as a web page, but integrity is not great; Office lacks native support for the format.

Alternatives

• MHTML

Some browsers save a directory of inline resources, such as images, alongside an html file. The collection is sometimes compressed, like the .war format used by Konqueror.

WebArchive: the class

This class is both:

• within the open source WebKit project
• within Mac OS X 10.3.9 and later, in the WebKit Objective-C Framework.

Use the WebArchive class to archive webpages, or place a portion of a webpage on the pasteboard, or to represent rich web content in any application.

References

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