Folks at iWebsaver has figured out an ingenious way to save web pages to your iPhone or iPod Touch for off-line viewing. They have been able to achieve this by converting the entire page to a data URL.

This makes iWebSaver an ideal iPhone web application to have if you want to do some off-line reading on your iPhone or iPod touch.

If you are wondering what a data URL is here is a brief description courtesy Wiki – The data: URI scheme defined in IETF standard is an URI scheme that allows inclusion of small data items inline, as if they were being referenced to as an external resource. They tend to be far simpler than alternative inclusion methods, such as MIME with cid: or mid:. According to the wording in the RFC, data: URIs are in fact URLs, although they do not actually locate anything.

iWebsaver provides two options to save web pages:

Option 1:

For this you need to do is follow 4 simple steps:
1. Visit iWebSaver.
2. Type in a URL (in the edit box above the "Save it now" button).
3. Tap "Save it Now".
4. When the website loads up completely choose "Add Bookmark" or "Add to Home Screen".

If you are looking to save a large page, you could even try out the Advanced mode.

However, in my opinion the problem using this option is that if you are looking to save a page with a long URL then you need to have the patience to type the entire URL manually which can get quite painful especially without the copy and paste functionality in the iPhone or iPod Touch.

Option 2:

The second option is a faster alternative called iWebSaver favelet with which you can save webpages with just two taps. Just click the following link iWebSaver favelet from your iPhone or iPod Touch and follow the instructions or just drag the following link iWebSaver favlet to your bookmarks or favorites on your computer and then sync your bookmarks to your iPhone or iPod Touch using iTunes.

Once you’re ready to start using the iWebSaver favelet all you need to do is click on the iWebsaver bookmark whenever you’re on a webpage that you want to save. I would recommend that you try out this option rather than the first one.

I tried this iPhone Web App for iPhone Hacks and it worked very well, however in case of some websites it was giving problems saving the web pages. This is probably due to some of the limitations of using data URLs as not all pages are suitable. You could check out this link to find out some of the reasons a page might not save as a data URL:

Also do remember that larger pages will take sometime to load, so be patient and larger pages also means that its "data: URL" will occupy more space on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

As always do share with us your thoughts on the the latest iPhone Application in the comments.

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