I really wish that browsers had developed first-class support for offline web page bundles. There's no way to share a page that is guaranteed to be self-contained and not hit the network, especially if you want to use javascript. It's particularly frustrating since browsers supported offline mode as far back as the 90s; it just needed to be combined with support for loading from zipped folders.
That simple change would've largely solved the academic paper problem decades ago. It's bizarre that it still isn't a feature.
Mail clients kinda do that (or at least they can, if asked to). Also, why would academic papers need JS anyway? CSS and images, I can get, but beyond that there's no need for anything fancier.
Yes, but it's not guaranteed to be self-contained. I wouldn't want to open a random HTML file knowing that it could phone home, or that the content might break one day without me realizing. There's a practical and psychological aspect to sharing `steves_paper_2014.html` versus `steves_paper_2014.offlinesitebundle`. The latter feels safe and immutable.
What you want is an HTML tag or response header that restricts network access, which the browser can then enforce. Offline or a list of allowed domains, this would be great for security in general. Not so great for advertisers though.
Then you have to verify that the tag is there, right? But if it has another extension like .offlinebundle you can know thay browsers will not make any extra requests.
Browsers don't have native support for opening WARC. It doesn't solve the safety problem either: you can still construct a WARC that phones home, AFAIK.
It's a great format for the problem it solves, but if browsers supported offline-only files the container format wouldn't (and shouldn't) need to be that complicated.
That simple change would've largely solved the academic paper problem decades ago. It's bizarre that it still isn't a feature.