Re:If you love a website, back it up
by garbagecreator on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:55PM
(#50341746)
I'd suppose most of those junk websites have no value in them, really. The most valuable information in the web is in good ol' (x)html, maybe some css. But something like readability.js [1] can help in filtering the junk around the main info.
[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/readability There's also a C rewrite: https://github.com/eafer/rdrview
You can save a web page or a text selection as ebook with this free and open source browser extension https://github.com/alexadam/save-as-ebook
It can also apply Readability before saving and it has a simple editor that you can use to remove unwanted html elements from a page.
But the modern web has made this unreasonable. Every webpage is 99% junk (CSS, JS, HTML structure, tracking pixels, UI images, navigation links, cryptominers (I joke)) and 1% content. You need a smart AI system to pick out the good parts, otherwise you'll quickly find yourself schlepping hundreds of gigs of junk to just preserve your favorite websites.
The better idea is: if you love information, back it up. Collect the knowledge from the website, not the website. And then preserve it. Create a free ebook. Or sell it on Amazon kindle. That'll last a lot longer than the website will, and any HTML backup of the site you could possibly make.