Monolith – CLI tool for saving complete web pages as a single HTML file

https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith

by iscream26 • 2 years ago

772 151 2 years ago

github.com

lagt_t• 2 years ago

I remember IE5 was able to do this lol. It fell out of vogue for some reason, glad to see the concept is still alive.

berkes• 2 years ago

Firefox can still do it.

thrdbndndn• 2 years ago

Chrome can too

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

Can it? I'm only having Firefox save a bunch of files.

phrz• 2 years ago

Safari does this with .webarchive files

toomuchtodo2• 2 years ago

Show HN: CLI tool for saving web pages as a single file - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20774322 - August 2019 (209 comments)

joeyhage• 2 years ago

It would be awesome to see support for following links to a specified depth, similar to [Httrack](https://www.httrack.com/)

codetrotter• 2 years ago

I made a basic crawler using Firefox, thirtyfour https://docs.rs/thirtyfour/latest/thirtyfour/ and squid

Basically, I took a start URL for the crawl, and my program would load the page in Firefox using thirtyfour, and then extract all links from the page and use some basic rules for keeping track of which ones to visit and in which order. I had Squid proxy configured to save all traffic that passed through it.

It worked ok-ish. I only really stopped that project because of a hardware malfunction.

The main annoyance that I didn’t get around to solving was being more smart about not trying to load non-html content that was already loaded anyway as part of the page. Because the way I extracted links from the page I also extracted URLs of JS, CSS etc that were referenced.

gildas10• 2 years ago

You can have a look at the last 2 examples here [1].

[1] https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/single-file-cli?tab=readme...

arp2422• 2 years ago

I wrote something very similar a few years ago – https://github.com/arp242/singlepage

I mostly use it for a few Go programs where I generate HTML; I can "just" use links to external stylesheets and JavaScript because that's more convenient to work with, and then process it to produce a single HTML file.

lopkeny12ko• 2 years ago

How does this compare to SingleFile?

https://www.npmjs.com/package/single-file-cli

gildas10• 2 years ago

Author of SingleFile here, one of the major differences is that monolith doesn't use a web browser to take page captures. As a result, it doesn't support JavaScript, for example. SingleFile, on the other hand, requires a Chromium-based browser to be installed. It should also produce smaller pages and is capable of generating ZIP or self-extracting ZIP files. However, it will take longer to capture a page. Note that since version 2, it is now possible to download executable files of the CLI tool [1].

[1] https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/single-file-cli/releases

darkteflon3• 2 years ago

SingleFile is amazing - use it tens of times every day across desktop and mobile. Can’t recall a single instance of it breaking. Thank you sincerely for your excellent work.

Capricorn2481• 2 years ago

On the front page, Monolith says it embeds javascript. Are you saying it doesn't use this javascript to render the page before taking a snap shot?

n8henrie• 2 years ago

requires a Chromium-based browser to be installed

Not to try to correct the author here, but it supports geckobrowser as well (not just chromium-based), right?

I'm currently trying to package for nixpkgs[0] and am using Firefox for the checkPhase.

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/283878

codazoda• 2 years ago

What does SingleFile do? The intro tells you how to run it, but not what it does.

mikae12• 2 years ago

SingleFile, on the other hand, requires a Chromium-based browser to be installed.

I'm using it as a a Firefox extension. Am I missing something?

DavideNL• 2 years ago

@gildas Curious, is there any specific reason why singlefile-cli is not available in Homebrew on macOS ?

PS. I use SingleFile a lot, it's great... Thank you!

tiagod• 2 years ago

I've been using SingleFile for ages now... it's my favorite browser extension after uBlock, thank you for your great tool! :)

simonw6• 2 years ago

Well this is fun... from the README here I learned I can do this on macOS:

    /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome \
    --headless --incognito --dump-dom https://github.com > /tmp/github.html

And get an HTML file for a page after the JavaScript has been executed.

Wrote up a TIL about this with more details: https://til.simonwillison.net/chrome/headless

My own https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/ tool (which uses headless Playwright Chromium under the hood) has a command for this too:

    shot-scraper html https://github.com/ > /tmp/github.html

But it's neat that you can do it with just Google Chrome installed and nothing else.

samstave4• 2 years ago

Yay! I love Shot Scrapeer - I wish you had made it a decade ago!

Thanks for shot scraper.

Off the top of you head what would be the easiest command to have shotscraper barf a directory of shot-scraper HTMLs each day from my daily browsing history.

This would be interesting if I have a browsing session for learning something and I am researching across a bunch of sites - roll it all up into a Digi-ography of the sites used in learning that topic?

---

I've always been baffled that this isnt an inate functionality in any app/OS - its a damn computeer - I should have a great ability to recall what it displays and what you have been doing.

Heck - we need our machines to write us a daily status report for what we did at the end of each day.

Surely that would change productivity. If you were force to do a self-digital-confession and stare you ADHD and procrastination right in the face.

jimmySixDOF• 2 years ago

look at ArchiveBox from the comments below

genewitch4• 2 years ago

This used to be fairly simple to do before https everywhere, just install squid (or whatever) and cron the cache folder to a zip file once a day or whatever.

There's paid solutions that kinda do what you want, but they capture all text on your screen and OCR it to make it searchable, which at least lets you backtrack and has the added advantage that it will make pdfs, meme images, etc searchable, too. last i heard it was mac only but a few folks mentioned some windows software that does it too.

as an aside i don't consider reading/learning nearly all day to be a net negative, even if ADD is to blame. (i haven't had the "H" since i was a child.) A status report wouldn't "stare" me in the face; in fact, it would be nice to have some language model take the daily report and over time suggest other things to read or possible contradictions to link to.

simonw6• 2 years ago

Yeah, things like Archive Box are probably a better bet there. But... you could write a script that queries the SQLite database of your history, figures out the pages you visited then loops through and runs `shot-scraper html ... > ...html` against each one.

I just wasted a few minutes trying to get Claude 3 Opus to write me a script - nearly got there but Firefox had my SQLite database locked and I lost interest. My conversation so far is at: https://gist.github.com/simonw/9f20a02f35f7a129b9850988117c0...

Hendrikto• 2 years ago

Heck - we need our machines to write us a daily status report for what we did at the end of each day.

I am sure Trump, Xi, Putin, etc. would like that very much.

simpaticoder• 2 years ago

Yes, it's a neat thing. I use a node script[1] that wraps the chrome invocation to do CLI driven acceptance testing with a node script that loads the site acceptance tests[2]. I adopted the simple convention to remove all body elements on successful completion, and checking the output string, but I've also considered other methods like embedding a JSON string and parsing it back out.

1 - https://simpatico.io/acceptance.js

2 - https://simpatico.io/acceptance

jaimex22• 2 years ago

Does shot-scraper have a work around for sites that detect headless chrome? ie. news.com.au , nowsecure.nl

simonw6• 2 years ago

No, nothing like that. I wonder how that detection works?

I tried this and it took a shot of a "bot detected" screen:

    shot-scraper https://news.com.au/

But when I used interactive mode I could take the screenshot - run this:

    shot-scraper -i https://news.com.au/

It opens a Chrome window. Then hit "enter" in the CLI tool to take the screenshot.

Exuma• 2 years ago

Mmmm…. This is clever

wodenokoto• 2 years ago

Can Firefox do the same?

dotancohen• 2 years ago

Thank you for shot-scraper! I've tested it in the past, but something severely missing from all screenshot tools, shot-scraper included, is a way to avoid screenshoting popups. For instance, newsletter or login popups, GDPR popups, etc. If shot-scraper has a reliable way of screenshoting websites while avoiding these popups, I would love to know.

I'm on mobile so don't have access to my notes, but I'm pretty sure that a year ago when I tried there was no reliable way to screenshot e.g. the BBC news website without getting the popups.

Again, thank you.

DANmode• 2 years ago

Screenshot the archive.org render?

grey8• 2 years ago

Just a thought, but what happens if you use orchestrate a browser instance with an installed ad blocker like uBlock Origin?

cjr2• 2 years ago

I work on a paid screenshot api[0] where we have features to either hide these banners and overlays using css, or alternatively we run some javascript to send a click event to what we detect as the 'accept' button in order to dismiss the popups.

It's quite a painful problem and we screenshot many millions of sites a day, our success rate at detecting these is high but still not 100%.

We have gotten quite far with heuristics and are exploring whether we can get better results by training a model.

[0] https://urlbox.com

simonw6• 2 years ago

Try this:

    shot-scraper -h 800 'https://www.spiegel.de/international/' \
      --wait-for "() => {
        const div = document.querySelector('[id^="sp_message_container"]');
        if (div) {
          div.remove();
          return true;
        }
      }"

shot-scraper runs that --wait-for script until it returns true. In this case we're waiting for the cookie consent overlay div to show up and then removing it before we take the screenshot.

Screenshots here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/de75355c39025f9a64548aa3366b1...

mkl• 2 years ago

Can shot-scraper load a bunch of content on an "infinite scroll" page before saving? I'm guessing Monolith can't as it has no JS. The most effective way I've found to work through the history of a big YouTube channel is to hold page-down for a while then save to a static "Web Page, Complete" HTML file, but it's a bit clunky.

seanwilson• 2 years ago

I found other problems in the area when trying to do this e.g. a lot of landing pages have hidden content that only animates in when you scroll down, subscribe/cookie overlays/modals covering content, hero headers that takes the height of the viewport ("height: 100vh") so if you make the page height large for taking a screenshot the header will cover all of it, and also sticky headers get in the way if you want to try scrolling while take multi-screenshots that are combined at the end.

You can come up with workarounds for each, but it's still hacky and there's always going to be other pages that need special treatment.

simonw6• 2 years ago

shot-scraper has a feature that's meant to help with this: you can inject additional al JavaScript into the page that can then act before the screenshot is taken.

I use that for things like accepting cookie banners, but using it to scroll down to trigger additional loading should work too.

There's also a --wait-for option which takes a JavaScript expression and polls until it's true before taking the shot - useful for if there's custom loading behavior you need to wait for.

Documentation here: https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/en/stable/screenshots.html

bonestamp22• 2 years ago

I guess while we're talking about useful CLI options for chrome, developers and hackers might enjoy this one... You can disable CORS in Chrome if you launch it from the command line with this switch: --disable-web-security

That's handy for when you're developing a front end and IT/devops hasn't approved/enabled the the CORS settings on the backend yet, or if you're just hacking around and want to get data from somewhere that doesn't allow cross domain requests.

aidenn0• 2 years ago

I wonder if there's an option to wait for a certain amount of time, or a particular event or something. I was trying to capture a page a few different ways, and most of them ended up with the Cloudflare "checking your browser" page.

msmagh• 2 years ago

Thanks for sharing, similar command is available in Windows as well.

I tested below command in PowerShell

& 'C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe' ` --headless ` --print-to-pdf="$env:USERPROFILE\Downloads\page.pdf" ` '<url>'

al_borland2• 2 years ago

I use read-it-later type services a lot, and save more than I read. On many occasions I've gone back to finally read things and find that the pages no longer exist. I'm thinking moving to some kind of offline archival version would be a better option.

amcpu• 2 years ago

I use a locally hosted YaCy instance with cached results to work around this scenario. Much of the content I am interested in is kept locally, so it’s good enough. When I have a bunch of “read later” tabs that pile up, I copy all their URLs into the crawler form with “Store to Web Cache” checked and it accomplishes what I described. Just another option to consider.

nelsonfigueroa2• 2 years ago

I've used ArchiveBox in the past and it's been great for this purpose: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox

saganus• 2 years ago

This is great, thanks!

hu32• 2 years ago

Hi! This seems amazing and sustainable since it leverages industry standard tools such as yt-dl and chrome headless.

Now I'm curious, what made you stop using it?

arp2422• 2 years ago

I have a lot of old unsorted bookmarks of "I want to look in to this, but don't have time now". Newer stuff is more organized, but I exported the old stuff and haven't looked at them in about five years.

Last week I started organizing them a bit, and it's shocking how much is a 404. Even from major newspapers and such. I have no idea why anyone would take down old content (outside of some specific and rare reasons). Some are also on neither internet archive or archive.today.

al_borland2• 2 years ago

I assume when it happens at big sites it’s from a major site design that doesn’t care to keep backward compatibility with old links.

mateo1• 2 years ago

I used to have almost 10k bookmarks that I was keeping from circa 2010 to 2017. Only to realize the majority of them were now useless. Some kind of tool like this is way overdue to become commonspread.

samstave4• 2 years ago

(They missed a chance to have a link to a download of the mtnl file of the github page haha)

Archive.org and wayback machine should ask for people to submit snaps of pages using this tool directly into the archive - especially during world events.

This would allow digtal archeologists to grok the sentiment of the world during that era...

(aside: when I interviewed at twitter they asked me what I thought twitter was, and I said I thought it was a global sentiment engine...)

But kudos to the world for having us now in the AI birth onto the global internet, as a wayback machine, coupled with AIs and LLMs and this tool - will allow one to ask questions about history in ways that will be very interesting.

"What was the general media coverage of [topic] in [decade] with respect to how we currently look at it - and are they articles covering [SUBJECT] in this topic for that time period.

etc...

account42• 2 years ago

Having a browser (Firefox?) actually innovate in this area instead of just reducing functionality to a carbon copy of Chrome is what is really overdue.

Martinussen3• 2 years ago

https://omnivore.app basically entirely filled that void in my life. 100% recommend.

avinassh• 2 years ago

does it archive / save web pages? I am using Omnivore too and I did not find this option.

jcul2• 2 years ago

How does it compare to pocket?

ethanpil• 2 years ago

Nice. My next step: Figure out how to make a web extension 1 click button. Tab to Monolith to Joplin with a tag.

gildas10• 2 years ago

You could download SingleFile [1], configure a WebDAV server in the options page (cf. "Destination" section), and set up Joplin to synchronize with the server.

[1] https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

dohello1• 2 years ago

and I thought my code pages were long haha

causality0• 2 years ago

How's this better than the MHTML functionality built into my browser?

gildas10• 2 years ago

You can find a comparison of file formats here: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile?tab=readme-ov-f...

stringtoint• 2 years ago

Nice! Reminds me of the time I was working on a browser extension to do this.

russellbeattie• 2 years ago

If anyone is interested, I wrote a long blog post where I analyzed all the various ways of saving HTML pages into a single file, starting back in the 90s. It'll answer a lot of questions asked in this thread (MHTML, SingleFile, web archive, etc.)

https://www.russellbeattie.com/notes/posts/the-decades-long-...

rnewme• 2 years ago

Cool post. You should make hn entry

andai3• 2 years ago

I always ship single file pages whenever possible. My original reasoning for this was that you should be able to press view source and see everything. (It follows that pages should be reasonably small and readable.)

An unexpected side effect is that they are self contained. You can download pages, drag them onto a browser to use them offline, or reupload them.

I used to author the whole HTML file at once, but lately I am fond of TypeScript, and made a simple build system to let me write games in TS and have them built to one HTML file. (The sprites are base64 encoded.)

On that note, it seems (there is a proposal) that browsers will eventually get support for TypeScript syntax, at which point I won't need a compiler / build step anymore. (Sadly they won't do type checking, but hey... baby steps!)

toastedwedge• 2 years ago

If I may ask, where can I read more about this? I wouldn't really know where to look for something like that, I'm afraid.

Edit: wording.

teaearlgraycold• 2 years ago

The proposal: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations

slmjkdbtl3• 2 years ago

I used to only do single file HTML pages too, until I have a page that have multiple occurrences of the same image, it's wasteful to have the dataurl string every time that img occurs. Maybe I can save the dataurl string in JS once and assign it to those img in JS, but most of the time my page doesn't have any JS it feels bad to use JS just for this.

csande17• 2 years ago

You could use the <use> element in an inline SVG to duplicate the same bitmap <image> to multiple parts of the page.

noduerme• 2 years ago

Doesn't this make the dead screen time rather long if you have to load all the game assets before you can even display a loader? (I guess you don't even have or need progress bars?)

hasty_pudding• 2 years ago

how do you share CSS between pages?

oneeyedpigeon2• 2 years ago

I'm guessing they use a build process to embed it inline in a <style> element.

_flux2• 2 years ago

On that note, it seems (there is a proposal) that browsers will eventually get support for TypeScript syntax, at which point I won't need a compiler / build step anymore. (Sadly they won't do type checking, but hey... baby steps!)

Careful what you wish for. Assuming the browser is able to run original TS without processing and you want type checking, then that also seems to effecticely lock the typechecking abilities of TS to their current level. Even without type checking it would already hinder the ability to add new syntax or standard types to TS.

Given TS is made for providing expressive typing over JS instead of constructively coming up with a type system with a language, there's still a lot of ground to cover, as can be seen by the improvements made in every TS release.

Sammi2• 2 years ago

No the proposal is _not_ to include Typescript type checking in the browser. The proposal is to make the browser understand where the ts types are so it can _ignore_ them. So that you can write ts and have it be type checked on your machine, and them ship the ts and have it run on client machines _without_ any type checking running there. The browser will run the ts as though it was js.

So the types will actually be able to be anything. It can be a completely different type checking superset language than Typescript even! Nothing will be locked at the current level.

It's a frikkin magical proposal.

https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations

phatskat• 2 years ago

Do you happen to have any resources on writing games in TS? I will def google, but game development has always been oddly hard for me and I’ve been in typescript land for a while now so figure it’s a good time to try again

andai3• 2 years ago

Does anyone know how an entire website can be restored from Wayback Machine? A beloved website of mine had its database deleted. Everything's on Internet Archive, but I think I'd have to

(1) scrape it manually (they don't seem to let you download an entire site?),

(2) write some python magic to fix the css URLs etc so the site can be reuploaded (and maybe add .html to the URLs? Or just make everything a folder with index.html...)

It seems like a fairly common use case but I barely found functional scrapers, let alone anything designed to restore the original content in a useful form.

belthesar• 2 years ago

I bet the ArchiveTeam might be able to help you out with this. They were quite helpful when I wanted to make sure a site was preserved, and might be able to help you as well, or at least point you in the right direction. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/

gildas10• 2 years ago

It's documented here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Restoring

AdieuToLogic2• 2 years ago

Or perhaps wget[0] as described here[1] and documented here[2] could do the trick.

0 - https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/

1 - https://tinkerlog.dev/journal/downloading-a-webpage-and-all-...

2 - https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html

mattsan• 2 years ago

This is addressed in the README and a comparison is given

AdieuToLogic2• 2 years ago

This is addressed in the README and a comparison is given

The only mention of wget in the README reads thusly:

  If compared to saving websites with wget -mpk, this tool
  embeds all assets as data URLs and therefore lets browsers
  render the saved page exactly the way it was on the
  Internet, even when no network connection is available.

This is not the only way to invoke wget in order to download a web page along with its assets. Should the introduction article I referenced above be deemed insufficient, consider this[0] as well.

0 - https://simpleit.rocks/linux/how-to-download-a-website-with-...

dosourcenotcode• 2 years ago

A cool tool to be sure.

However I feel this tool is a crutch for the stupid way browsers handle web pages and shouldn't be necessary in a sane world.

Instead of the bullshit browsers do where they save a page as "blah.html" file + "blah_files" folder they should instead wrap both in folder that can then later be moved/copied as one unit and still benefit from it's subcomponents being easily accessed / picked apart as desired.

genewitch4• 2 years ago

"save as [single] html" or whatever hasn't worked reliably in over a decade. I wrote a snapshotter that i could post in a slack alternative "!screenshot <URL>" and it would respond (eventually) with an inline jpeg and a .png link of that URL. As i mentioned upthread, this worked for a couple of years (2017-2020 or so) and then it became unreliable on some sites as well. as an example, old.reddit.com hellthread pages would only render blank white after the first couple dozen comments.

I haven't had the heart to try it with singlefile, but now that there's at least 3 tools that claim to do this correctly, i might try again. This tool, singlefile (which i already use but haven't tested on reddit yet) and archivebox. 4 tools, if you count the WARC stuff from archive.org

jchook3• 2 years ago

Hm, very interesting, especially for bookmarking/archiving.

I'm curious, why not use the MHTML standard for this?

- AFAIK data URIs have practical length limits that vary per browser. MHTML would enable bundling larger files such as video.

- MHTML would avoid transforming meaningful relative URLs into opaque data URIs in the HTML attributes.

- MHTML is supported by most major browsers in some way (either natively in Chrome or with an extension in Safari, etc).

- MIME defines a standard for putting pure binary data into document parts, so it could avoid the 33% size inflation from base64 encoding. That said, I do not know if the `binary` Content-Transfer-Encoding is widely supported.

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

MHTML is supported by most major browsers in some way

Firefox? What about mobile versions of browsers?

jchook3• 2 years ago

We should submit a PR

snshn3• 2 years ago

MHTML support is planned, there's a couple of other problems that need to be resolved first, but it's a good format for archiving, been requested many times

jchook3• 2 years ago

Thanks for the reply. Very exciting. I would love to see MHTML support on this.

sunshine202022• 2 years ago

fun

publius_0xf3• 2 years ago

Awesome tool. A note to the devs: the latest version on winget is v2.7.0, which is several months behind the latest version.

fagrobot• 2 years ago

https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

victorbjorklund• 2 years ago

This is great. I have wished for something like this.

max_2• 2 years ago

It still blows my mind that browsers don't provide features this out of the box.

Alifatisk• 2 years ago

I think they do? Have you tried hitting cmd+s or ctrl+s? You can save webpages like that.

But I don’t know if they can compress everything into a single html file though.

max_2• 2 years ago

Alot of the CSS & JavaScript is usually broken with ctrl+s.

A great option used to be the mhtml format chrome. (It had to be enabled in chrome flags)

But mhtml seemed to be removed from chrome since recently.

vanderZwan• 2 years ago

Last time I tried that it saved a static version of the current DOM, instead of the page source. I'm assuming that the reasoning behind that is that most people want to save a snapshot of what they are currently seeing, and that this is the easiest way to have somewhat reliable results for that.

snshn3• 2 years ago

So true. Monolith is using libraries made by Mozilla for their Rust-driven browser engine (which I believe, never happened to be). I really would love for it to be a part of some browser one day, the demand is clearly there. Nobody likes to have a file+folder abomination on their drive, or some shady formats like .webarchive

Gormo• 2 years ago

The MHTML format [1] has been around for 25 years and was natively supported by multiple browsers for decades. Modern browsers have regressed in functionality.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHTML

hu32• 2 years ago

Chrome does support it:

https://i.imgur.com/HF7GXEI.png

k1ck4ss• 2 years ago

How would I archive an on-prem hosted redmine solution (https://www.redmine.org/)? It is many, many years old and I want to abandon it for good but save everything and archive it. Is that possible with monolith?

planb• 2 years ago

You're probably better off with a recursive wget here. IIRC redmine was not really javascript heavy and monolith looks to me like it only saves one page.

keyle• 2 years ago

I am really loving these 'new' pure rust tools that are super fast and efficient, with lovely API/doco. Ah, it feels like the 90s again... Minus 50% bugs probably.

snshn3• 2 years ago

Hey, at least no memory leaks this time! Ü

farzadmf• 2 years ago

Ironically, I decided to try with the repo's own Github page, and when I open the resulting HTML file in Chrome, it's all errors in the console, and I don't see the `README` or anything

yencabulator• 2 years ago

Github is a pile of Javascript that adds things to the DOM browser-side, the monolith README specifically says it does not run Javascript, and shows you a workaround for when that matters.

AdmiralAsshat• 2 years ago

So what happens if the page is behind a paywall and the embedded Javascript stores some authentication or phone-home code? Does that end up getting invoked on the monolith copy HTML?

I'm wondering how this would work if I wanted to use it to, say, save a quiz from Udemy for offline review.

hollander• 2 years ago

yt-dlp can use browser cookies to get access to Facebook videos. This should have something similar.

    yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox https://www.facebook.com/1234videos/5678/

fs111• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WARC_(file_format)

pbnjeh3• 2 years ago

Does anyone remember the Firefox extension Scrapbook, from "back in the day"? I used to use it a lot.

Look "back" 5 - 10 years, or more, and it's striking how many web resources are no longer available. A local copy is your only insurance. And even then, having it in an open, standards compliant format is important (e.g. a file you can load into a browser -- I guess either a current browser or a containerized/emulated one from the era of the archived resource).

Something that concerns me about JavaScript-ed resources and the like. Potentially unlimited complexity making local copies more challenging and perhaps untenable.

Monolith – CLI tool for saving complete web pages as a single HTML file

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