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Community & Business Groups

Proposed Group: Offline URL Community Group

The Offline URL Community Group has been proposed by Mike Perlman:


Currently a file URL (file:///) is the defined way to access a local file in a browser. For various reasons (some outdated) this is not a preferred mechanism. There have been several unsuccessful attempts to create an alternative, but these were focused on application-type functionality and not content.

For content originally created in HTML, it makes the most sense to offer a mechanism to store the file locally in the same format. While, if this is desired, that process is the responsibility of the site, the browser functionality for it must be a recognized standard.

This initiative is focused on creating an offline url standard to access HTML files and containers stored locally in a compressed format, but otherwise behave as close to possible as an online site accessed via http.

The charter for this group is currently under development on GitHub. If you are interested please follow and contribute there.


You are invited to support the creation of this group. Once the group has a total of five supporters, it will be launched and people can join to begin work. In order to support the group, you will need a W3C account.

Once launched, the group will no longer be listed as “proposed”; it will be in the list of current groups.

If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please send us email on site-comments@w3.org

Thank you,
W3C Community Development Team

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