Saving offline webpage

You can easily be surfing around and find a page that you find very interesting, to the point that you want to save this so that you can read it at a later time. Easy, in Internet Explorer you just need to go to the File menu and select Save As and everything is done. The page’s text will have been saved in a HTML file, but the images and other multimedia elements will be located in a separate folder. This is not very practical when you want to sent the entire contents of the page via email, or if you simply want to keep a record of interesting web sites.

As you would have understood, the purpose of this tip is to show you how you can save all of the pictures as well as the text of a web site in one singular file with the .mht (not .html) extension. This file format was seen in Internet Explorer version 5 for the first time and has been since kept in later versions.

For your information, MHT stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension HTML (MHTML). No, your not dreaming, and this format is designed for email, its actually the Web Archive function (.mht file) and it is delivered with the Inetcomm.dll file (Microsoft’s Internet Messaging API) which is installed by default with Outlook Express 5 and later. In other words, the saving of files in mht format can not happen unless Outlook Express is present on the system, which is not difficult as IE and Outlook Express require extra changes to completely remove themselves from the system…

Here’s how it can be done:

When you are in Internet Explorer, go to File > Save As and specify the location where you want your files to be saved, then in the drop down box chose “Web Archive, single file (*.MHT)” and click the save button.

During the save of your files, the progress bar will be displayed:

Here you can see the web page has been saved in one single file that contains all the pictures and multimedia files as well as the text.

To look at this page you simply need to double click on the file, and it will open exactly as it was on the internet.

I known about this tip for a while now and I am sure that there are a few of you out there that know about it as well, but seeing that a lot of people pick up new ways of doing things in the world of computers I don’t think anyone will mind reading about it again ;-)