When you click on a link, your browser makes a request to the server. Sometimes
that link simply specifies a file, such as another html web page or a graphic
file or other media file. But sometimes the link you click on does NOT specify
a file but rather activates a script or other special program on the server
and this program looks at your request and creates on the fly, real time, the
name of a file which the server then sends back to you.

You receive the file, but NOT the script or program which created the file
name, located that file and sent it to you.

httrack emulates a browser in many ways and in this case that means that it
retrieves the _result_ of following a link; it does NOT copy the inner
workings of the server which produced that result. 

The scripts, programs and databases that make up a server can cause the exact
same link to deliver different results to a browser depending on things like
time, user id, newly added data and phase of the moon. That's what it means to
say that a mirror is a _snapshot_. You followed that link and got your result
AT THAT MOMENT; what result you get next time from that same link may or may
not be the same.

What you definitely do not get is the programs and data and logic behind the
web page. All you get is the final vanilla "print out". 

When you cut your internet connection and browse your mirror locally, it looks
(barring other problems) exactly like what you would see had you browsed the
site online - at the time and under the circumstances that held when httrack
retrieved the site. But what you are seeing is a fixed static copy of what the
server gave httrack - no scripts, no database retrievals just simple direct
links to plain files on your local machine.

Make sense?

Rufus