Re: [Feature] add a new org-attach dispatcher command to offline save web page

[Matthew Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org>]

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com> writes:

> It does not mean that attaching URL directly is not worth including
> into org. This sounds pretty common use case, especially considering
> the number of packages providing similar feature. You mentioned
> org-board, but there is also org-download and org-web-tools.

My uneasiness has more to do with the specificity of the dependence on
monolith and the way that is hard-coded into the patch. When it comes to
patches, I think priority should go to those that are configurable,
accessible, and useful for everyone as opposed to those that have
hard-coded work-flows or highly-specific user configurations.

> I agree that monolith is completely uncommon tool and I would not expect
> the majority of users to have it installed, but the same functionality
> utilising built-in url.el (as a default) should be acceptable.

The question is: which functionality? A simple downloading tool or a
full archival tool? Achieving similar functionality to org-board or
monolith would a big task, since they aim to download an archival
version of a webpage (including all resources). In addition, with
archiving you also quickly run into the complexity of versioning based
on time archived. There's also the challenge of mapping the downloaded
files to metadata (specifically the original url). Org-board currently
handles both of these very well.

I suppose there would be a few options depending on what the aims are:

1. At the simple end, include little more than than a quick and dirty
   way of downloading a single resource (html, pdf, jpeg) using url.el
   or wget (or optionally, monolith) and putting that in the attachment
   folder. Those who want full archiving of all resources could use
   other tools like org-board or org-web-tools.

2. At the (much) more complex end, it would be to code out a robust
   archiving solution on top of url.el or wget.

3. Another, possibly simpler option... Add a command to the dispatcher
   that allows the user to invoke a custom function that is called with
   the attachment directory as the default-directory. This would enable
   more end-user flexibility, such as the ability to use
   wkhtmtoimage/wkhtmltopdf, monolith, phantom.js, archive.is, etc.

Best,

Matt