Internet - Web Page Saving

The current BPCA meeting place does not have broadband access and only very slow dial up access to the internet. At a recent meeting it was suggested that the various sites available through the BPCA Links page be shown at a future meeting.

This brought up a discussion of how long it would take, with the available technology, to bring up each page. I suggested that the sites be downloaded and placed on a CD or thumb drive.

It seems that no one in attendance knew how to do such a save. As a result, I have decided to give some basic instructions through this blog.

These instructions will involve using either the Internet Explorer or Firefox browser; there are other ways of saving a web page locally, such as the Web Capture capabilities in the full Adobe Acrobat software and others, but most of us do not have access to such expensive software.

The following table shows the options available for each of the browsers being used:

Browser	Save As Type	Save As Result
Internet Explorer Firefox	Web Page, complete (*.htm, *.html)	A file named with the page title and an htm extension, containing the HTML and a folder with the same name containing all other information needed to display the page. (Includes images, CSS, etc.)
Internet Explorer Only	Web Archive, single file (*.mht)	A file named with the page title and an an mht extension, that contains all the information needed to display the page. NOTE: Firefox, to my knowledge and experience can neither read nor open a file that has an mht extension.
Internet Explorer Firefox	Web Page, HTML only (*,htm, *.html)	A file named with the page title and an htm extension, containing the HTML only.
Internet Explorer Firefox	Text File (*.txt)	A file named with the page title and an txt extension, containing the text only.

Once the page has been saved to your local hard drive, you can copy it to a CD, thumb drive, or other device not connected to the internet and open them with your browser of choice, except that you can not open the mht Web Archive in any other browser than IE. Of course, the links within the pages will not be operational, as they are pointing to another web page that would need to be accessed online.

Try the different options for yourself to find out what works best for your purposes. As always, let me know by commenting of this posting if this works for you, or if you have any questions.