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Comment by mdaniel

I have never used monolith to say with any certainty, but two things in your description are worth highlighting between the goals of WARC versus the umpteen bazillion "save this one page I'm looking at as a single file" type projects:

1. WARC is designed, as a goal, to archive the request-response handshake. It does not get into the business of trying to make it easy for a browser to subsequently display that content, since that's a browser's problem

2. Using your cited project specifically, observe the number of "well, save it but ..." options <https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith#options> which is in stark contrast to the archiving goals I just spoke about. It's not a good snapshot of history if the server responded with `content-type: text/html;charset=iso-8859-1` back in the 90s but "modern tools" want everything to be UTF-8 so we'll just convert it, shall we? Bah, I don't like JavaScript, so we'll just toss that out, shall we? And so on

For 100% clarity: monolith, and similar, may work fantastic for any individual's workflow, and I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum; but I do want to highlight that all things being equal it should always be possible to derive monolith files from warc files because the warc files are (or at least have the goal of) perfect fidelity of what the exchange was. I would guess only pcap files would be of higher fidelity, but also a lot more extraneous or potentially privacy violating details

parent mdaniel 2 years ago

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