A lot of people use the services provided by Instapaper or Pocket to view web pages offline. You select to save them to the service from within the web page. Then, you go to the app (yep, the's apps for that ), and you can then view them.
Instapaper costs around $5 USD or so, while Pocket is free. The neat thing I like is they "strip" out all but the article. So, you just get the words.
If you open the app and download all the articles you've saved before you lose Internet access, all the articles will be saved to your iPad for offline viewing.
There are other apps like these, but these are the only two I know off the top of my head....
Readability is a free alternative... it has a firefox module, an ipad app and it is also integrated in the icab browser (for saving pages off-line from the ipad)