Webarchive

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The webarchive file format is available on Apple's Mac platform for saving and reviewing complete web pages using the Safari browser.^[1] Support for webarchive documents only exists on Macs; Safari 3 on Windows does not support the format.

Other web browsers use the MHTML format or do the equivalent by saving a directory of inline resources (usually images) alongside the html file,^{[citation needed]} sometimes compressed, like the .war format used by Konqueror (tar+gzip or tar+bzip2).

The webarchive format is a concatenation of source files with filenames saved in the binary plist format using NSKeyedEncoder^{[citation needed]}. Although it is a platform-independent format, many people prefer to use Safari's Print to PDF feature instead to store webpages. Indeed, the .webarchive format appears to more be a convenience for Mac developers. The API uses webarchives to simplify using cutting-and-pasting with whole or partial web pages.^{[citation needed]}

Workarounds to allow the file to be viewed in other browsers such as Windows Internet Explorer are possible, though specific webpage contents may hinder this process:

• Open the webarchive file using TextEdit.
• Open the webarchive file using Word for Mac 2004 and save it as a web page from Word's file menu.
• Use the free tools WebArchive Folderizer^[1] or WebArchive Extractor.^[2]

References