The best way to save a webpage seems to be as a .maff file — Mozilla Archive Format. This is just a zip file of the webpage and all its subdirectories, so it is simpler than an .mht file, which is in a Microsoft proprietrary format.
The problem is that hovering on an .mht file displays it in the Viewer, whereas hovering on a .maff file does not. Is there a DOpus plugin that will display a .maff file in the Viewer?
I've never even heard of .maff before, and no there's no plugin for it that I know of. Feel free to write one if you like!
.MHT isn't "Microsoft proprietary", even if they may have invented it, since all browsers support it in one form or another. See this page for more information.
Thanks, Jon. Here is the basic information on .maff files. To a non-expert, it all seems a good idea and very reasonable:
maf.mozdev.org/maff-file-format.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Archive_Format
(but such choices are always more complicated than they seem). What is needed is a plugin that looks inside the zip file and displays the webpage hidden inside --- beyond me, I'm afraid. Without that, the .mht or .mhtml options are far easier to use because they come up straight away in the Viewer.
Agreeing with the previous writer (now 2 years ago) -- has this issue been addressed? It would be helpful to see a thumbnail of a maff file rather than just the firefox icon. If as is said maff is basically a zip file, is there a way to add maff to the list of filetypes that can be accommodated?
Thanks.
Wouldn´t renaming those files to Zip work, as it is possible with the .cbz comic book format?
Wouldn´t renaming those files to Zip work, as it is possible with the .cbz comic book format?[/quote]
Yeah it would but I think Julianon wants to be able to actually preview the file rather than just displaying the contents.
I agree - good idea, but renaming it from .maff just turns the handling into that for a zip file, which is a different icon and a listing inside. Like was just pointed out, the idea would be to actually process the file to display the web page that was archived. This might take a little bit of processing time, so it could be an option e.g. for slower machines, but it would be great to have. And presumably quite doable since firefox is open source.
I am trying to display my MAFF files from Firefox, and it still appears to be a problem. I would be very happy if Directory Opus and Firefox could work together on this. They are my favorite apps, and I use them all day long.
Please consider this. It's now been three years since the original comment.
Thanks
It's a while since I looked in detail, so someone correct me if I am wrong, but AFAIK Firefox don't provide a way to use their browser within other programs, without embedding and maintaining a completely separate copy of their code into the other program.
i.e. There isn't a way to use the installed version of Firefox to render things into the viewer pane; we'd have to build our own version of Firefox into Opus, work out how to modify it to run inside our windows and threading models, have our own settings UI and profile storage etc., and then continually patch the code for security updates and so on.
If Firefox wrote and installed a preview handler as part of their browser then we would support using that to view files. Similarly, they could provide a thumbnail handler to display thumbnails for any of their file types. Both would work in Windows Explorer / File Explorer, Directory Opus and Microsoft Outlook without any need for changes on our side or Microsoft's side, as there is a standard API for doing so.
In other words, there are already standard APIs available to any company interested in providing previewing and/or thumbnailing capabilities to other programs. If Firefox aren't implementing those APIs then they probably aren't interested in this, which make the whole thing a non-starter.
(Firefox is an open source project, but this kind of work would require a broad understanding of the whole application, and ongoing consideration, testing and maintenance when new changes are made to Firefox. It's something that could only really be done by part of their main team and integrated into their official feature list, if it was to keep working. If we or another random person attempted it, it would likely be a huge kludge and then break immediately when Firefox got updated. Indeed, a few projects have attempted this and ended up just like that.)
Alternatively, if Firefox provided some other kind of reusable/embeddable component (e.g. an ActiveX control) as part of their browser install, then we could potentially use that as well. That would not work in File Explorer or Outlook, and would require work on our side to hook it up, but we'd be willing to do that if there was a clean way to do it and it looked like it had buy-in from the main Firefox team (i.e. so it would remain supported with feature and security updates, and continue working as the browser code evolved, not stuck on a particular version of the browser forever).
With both the above options, the ball is in Firefox's court really. If they wanted to implement a preview handler and/or thumbnail handler then we wouldn't be involved at all (unless they needed advice or something, but it's a really simple API to implement on the viewer side). If they wanted to provide a component other programs can embed, then we'd only be involved with hooking it up on our side; the component would have to exist first.
As a more simple alternative, it might be possible to display .maff files by extracting the zip contents and then viewing them using Internet Explorer (which does provide a reusable component that other applications can use to render HTML). But I would assume if you're using .maff then you want Firefox to do the rendering, not IE. (Otherwise you'd probably be using the more common .MHT format that does the same thing.)