It may be; I just have a foolish built-in mindset that "PDF is big, and HTML is small" (uncontaminated by anything silly like checking the sizes of PDF and HTML versions of the same page). Since I usually only use this to queue up casual reading, it's not very important to me that it be an extremely faithful copy; I just grab the "Print view" if there is one.
Firefox, with "Web page, complete", and Safari, with "Web archive", are both pretty good at grabbing dependencies. If I really want a good mirror, then I use wget.
The advantages of saving the file over not closing the browser are two:
1. it's persistent across reboots / power failure (a pressing concern on an old machine that sometimes decides it's time for an unannounced reboot);
2. it scales well with the number of articles I want to save—I'd rather have 100 files saved than 100 tabs open, and the former doesn't cause any slow-down.
> Do you have a workflow where you save to a specific place to see when you are on the train?
I'm not sure that I understand the question; sorry.
So, I would think it would be great if you could "triage" pages you wanted to save for later. Even if I could move them from a "to read" to a "read" pile would be awesome. Didn't know if you had any pointers on making that happen.
Edit: I should say, btw, I actually do use my "don't close tabs" for the train. My commutes are typically small, so I don't do large readings.
Not really; I do a first, basic sort when saving according to very crude topic (Math, CS, news, …). When I actually read, I treat it essentially as if I were reading online; unless I really enjoy the file, I delete it after reading. If I do enjoy it, I move it to a separate 'permanent' storage area.
One advantage of this over bookmarks for me is that I somehow spend more time looking at my directory tree than my bookmarks, and so am more bothered by an enormous (in the sense of number of files, not size) directory than by my bookmarks becoming, as you say, a massive dumping ground. Thus, having the files on disk somehow seems to cause me to deal with them, either sorting them more carefully or deleting them, much sooner (or, at least, before the end of time :-) ).