Brion Vibber wrote:
Please do *not* use programs such as Webstripper. Especially on dynamic sites like Wikipedia, they create a huge amount of load on the servers by downloading thousands upon thousands of pages extremely rapidly. [...] Use a web browser like everybody else, and please stop attacking the web sites that you enjoy.
While I of course agree with Brion's statement, I think we should also try to understand the other side. When I was still on a dial-up line that charged by the minute, I also several times tried to download interesting sites all at once, so that I could read them leisurely off-line. That seems to be quite natural behavior. You can't really learn stuff when the clock is ticking.
Don't we have a nice compressed static HTML tree by now that we could offer people under the "Download Wikipedia" heading on the main page?
Our customer here was only interested in math articles, and a download of the whole Wikipedia probably wouldn't even have been attractive for him. So a web site with a static version of Wikipedia that is open to programs like Webstripper would also be a good thing.
Actually, I'm sure that once we offer ready-made HTML trees for download, someone somewhere will set up such a site.
Axel