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httrack/html/changes.html
Xavier Roche 58e8aec88f The doc footer drops the patents chicklet, and two pages escape the check (#1157)
* The doc footer drops the patents chicklet, and two pages escape the check

The shipped doc footer had drifted from httrack.com's: no End Software
Patents chicklet, no <small> around the copyright line so it rendered a
size larger than the site's, and a .5rem top margin holding it off the
panel's black edge. doc.css now takes site.css's .sitefooter shape (flex
row, line-height 1.3, no top margin), with the chicklet at the far end.

The chicklet ships as html/images/esp_chicklet.png and is referenced
relatively rather than by the site's absolute src, since these pages are
read off the install directory where that would be a broken image and an
outbound request from a local page. The link points at the canonical
https://endsoftwarepatents.org/innovating-without-patents/, where the
site's http URL lands after two redirects, and uses target="_blank"
because _new is not a target keyword.

The footer also becomes its own doc-chrome region, as the masthead did in
#1154. It used to sit inside the generated bottom region, which index.html
and guide.html do not have: both build their own sidebar and take the
masthead alone, so their footers were hand-maintained and unchecked.
Corrupting index.html's footer text passes --check on master and fails
after this; a page that loses the markers is reported rather than crashing
the generator.

The year stays hardcoded: --check diffs the regenerated chrome against the
shipped bytes, so computing it would red CI every 1st of January.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Xavier Roche <roche@httrack.com>

* Report a malformed chrome region per page instead of aborting the run

A page whose region markers are half-present reached region()'s bare
SystemExit, which named no page and stopped the sweep, so a drift on any
later page went unreported. Catch it per page, print the page, and carry
on. A duplicate marker pair is now rejected too: region() substitutes the
first pair only, so a trailing second one shipped unchecked on any region,
the masthead included.

Also add rel="noopener" to the chicklet link, and reword two comments: the
footer's contrast note no longer claims .8em now that <small> nests inside
it, and doc.css points at site.css's .sitefooter as the shape it mirrors.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Xavier Roche <roche@httrack.com>

---------

Signed-off-by: Xavier Roche <roche@httrack.com>
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-11 11:28:05 +00:00

227 lines
8.4 KiB
HTML

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<!-- doc-chrome:head -->
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<meta name="description" content="The change report HTTrack writes after an update, field by field.">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="doc.css">
<script src="doc.js" defer></script>
<!-- /doc-chrome:head -->
<title>HTTrack change report format</title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- doc-chrome:top -->
<!-- doc-chrome:masthead -->
<a class="skip" href="#main">Skip to content</a>
<header class="masthead">
<img src="images/wordmark.svg" width="400" height="36" alt="HTTrack Website Copier">
<div class="tagline">Free software offline browser</div>
</header>
<!-- /doc-chrome:masthead -->
<div class="wrap">
<nav class="toc" aria-label="Documentation">
<h2>On this page</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="#what-changed-means">What "changed" means</a></li>
<li><a href="#with-the-cache-off">With the cache off</a></li>
<li><a href="#fields">Fields</a></li>
<li><a href="#encoding">Encoding</a></li>
<li><a href="#example">Example</a></li>
<li><a href="#notes">Notes</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>Start here</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="guide.html">Interface guide</a></li>
<li><a href="faq.html">FAQ and troubleshooting</a></li>
<li><a href="abuse.html">Using HTTrack responsibly</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>Command line</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="cmdguide.html">Command-line guide</a></li>
<li><a href="httrack.man.html">Option reference</a></li>
<li><a href="filters.html">Filter syntax</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>Developers</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="dev.html">Programming</a></li>
<li><a href="library.html">libhttrack API</a></li>
<li><a href="plug.html">Callbacks</a></li>
<li><a href="scripting.html">Scripting</a></li>
<li><a href="cache.html">Cache format</a></li>
<li><a href="changes.html" aria-current="page" class="here">Change report format</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>More</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="fcguide.html">Users Guide (3.10)</a></li>
<li><a href="contact.html">Contact and credits</a></li>
<li><a href="index.html">All documentation</a></li>
</ul>
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<main id="main">
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<h1>Change report format specification</h1>
<br />
Run with <tt>--changes</tt> (<tt>-%d</tt>), HTTrack writes <tt>hts-changes.json</tt>
in the project directory, next to <tt>hts-log.txt</tt>, describing what the crawl
left new, changed, unchanged and gone compared to the previous mirror. The file is
rewritten from scratch at the end of every run, and the log carries a one-line
summary of the same counts.
<br /><br />
<h3 id="what-changed-means">What "changed" means</h3>
A resource is changed when its bytes differ, not when the server merely re-sent
it. HTTrack compares the payload it just received against the copy the previous
run left behind: for pages it parses, the previous payload comes from the cache
(the file on disk carries the mirror footer and its crawl date, so its bytes
differ on every run); for everything else, the mirrored file is the payload
verbatim and is compared directly.
<br /><br />
Where no digest can be taken on either side, because the cache is disabled or
the previous copy is gone, the report falls back to the transfer signal, and a
server that answers 200 rather than 304 reads as changed. Keeping the cache on
(the default) is what makes the report precise.
<br /><br />
<h3 id="with-the-cache-off">With the cache off</h3>
<tt>--cache=0</tt> costs the report more than the digest of a parsed page. The
mirror's file index (<tt>hts-cache/new.lst</tt>) is what records which files a
run produced, so without it there is no previous mirror to subtract from: nothing
is reported <tt>gone</tt>, and whether the run is a first crawl cannot be decided
at all, which <tt>first_crawl</tt> states as <tt>null</tt> rather than guess. What
is on disk is still compared byte for byte, so the other three lists stay
meaningful, except for the pages HTTrack parses: those have no cached payload to
compare against and fall back to the transfer signal.
<br /><br />
<h3 id="fields">Fields</h3>
<ul>
<li><tt>schema</tt>: format version, currently <tt>1</tt>. It is bumped only
on an incompatible change; new fields may appear without one.</li>
<li><tt>generator</tt>: the HTTrack build that wrote the file.</li>
<li><tt>date</tt>: when the report was written, UTC, <tt>YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ</tt>.</li>
<li><tt>first_crawl</tt>: true when no index of a previous mirror
(<tt>hts-cache/old.lst</tt>) was found, so there was nothing to compare against and
everything is listed as new. Null when the run kept no index at all and the
question cannot be answered (see above).</li>
<li><tt>partial</tt>: true when the report ran out of memory and lists only
part of the mirror.</li>
<li><tt>purged</tt>: true when <tt>--purge-old</tt> was in effect, so the
files under <tt>gone</tt> were also deleted from disk.</li>
<li><tt>counts</tt>: the size of each of the four lists.</li>
<li><tt>new</tt>, <tt>changed</tt>, <tt>unchanged</tt>, <tt>gone</tt>: the
lists themselves. Every mirrored file appears in exactly one of them.</li>
</ul>
Each entry is an object:
<ul>
<li><tt>url</tt>: the absolute URL the file came from. Empty under
<tt>gone</tt>: deletions are computed from the mirror's file index, which records
paths, not URLs.</li>
<li><tt>file</tt>: the path relative to the mirror root, with forward
slashes. This is the entry's identity: a URL and a redirect that resolve to the
same local file are one entry, not two.</li>
<li><tt>size</tt>: the mirrored file's size in bytes, absent when the file
is not on disk.</li>
<li><tt>previous_size</tt>: under <tt>changed</tt> only, the size of the
copy the previous run left.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<h3 id="encoding">Encoding</h3>
The file is JSON, UTF-8. URLs and local paths reach HTTrack as raw bytes and are
not guaranteed to be valid UTF-8; any byte sequence that is not becomes
U+FFFD (<tt>\ufffd</tt>), so the file always parses. Compare on <tt>file</tt>
rather than on <tt>url</tt> when a mirror is known to carry legacy-charset URLs.
<br /><br />
<h3 id="example">Example</h3>
One captured run; <tt>generator</tt> and <tt>date</tt> will read differently in yours.
<pre>
{
"schema": 1,
"generator": "HTTrack Website Copier/3.49-14",
"date": "2026-07-26T15:29:03Z",
"first_crawl": false,
"partial": false,
"purged": true,
"counts": { "new": 1, "changed": 1, "unchanged": 1, "gone": 1 },
"new": [
{ "url": "http://example.com/d.html", "file": "example.com/d.html", "size": 280 }
],
"changed": [
{ "url": "http://example.com/a.html", "file": "example.com/a.html", "size": 281, "previous_size": 273 }
],
"unchanged": [
{ "url": "http://example.com/b.html", "file": "example.com/b.html", "size": 277 }
],
"gone": [
{ "url": "", "file": "example.com/c.html" }
]
}
</pre>
<br /><br />
<h3 id="notes">Notes</h3>
<ul>
<li>A file listed under <tt>gone</tt> is only deleted when <tt>--purge-old</tt> is
on. Left in place it drops out of the mirror's index, so it is reported once and
not again.</li>
<li>A resource whose local file name changed since the previous mirror (a new
MIME type, say) is reported as <tt>new</tt> under its new name; the old name is
reported as <tt>gone</tt> only if the file is still on disk. The two entries are
not paired.</li>
<li>A resource this run tried and failed to transfer also drops out of the
mirror's index, but its previous copy is untouched, so it is reported
<tt>unchanged</tt>. Under <tt>--purge-old</tt> that copy is deleted anyway, and
the report says <tt>gone</tt> to match.</li>
<li>A run that transfers no data at all is rolled back: HTTrack restores the
previous cache generation and leaves the previous report in place, so a lost
connection does not overwrite a good report with an empty one.</li>
<li>Content diffs, and keeping the previous copy of a changed page, are out of
scope: both change what a mirror directory contains.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br />
<!-- doc-chrome:bottom -->
</main>
</div>
<dialog id="zoom" aria-label="Enlarged image"><img src="" alt=""></dialog>
<!-- /doc-chrome:bottom -->
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<footer>
<small>&copy; 1998-2026 Xavier Roche &amp; other contributors - Web Design: Leto Kauler.</small>
<a href="https://endsoftwarepatents.org/innovating-without-patents/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="This site is innovating without patents!"><img src="images/esp_chicklet.png" width="91" height="17" alt="End Software Patents"></a>
</footer>
<!-- /doc-chrome:footer -->
</body>
</html>