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578 points smusamashah | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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johnfn ◴[] No.42463936[source]
I think "single HTML file" sets up a certain expectation that a five-thousand-line long HTML file with ~3500 lines of embedded JS doesn't really live up to. I mean, hey, everything can be a single HTML file if you embed the bundle inline in your HTML!

Cool project, though - don't mean to take away anything from it.

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rpdillon ◴[] No.42464173[source]
I totally understand your take, but as a guy that spends most of his time on side projects working on single HTML files, I have a different perspective.

I find the totally self-contained nature of them very appealing because it travels well through space and time, and it's incredibly accessible, both online and offline.

My current side project is actually using a WebDAV server to host a wide variety of different single HTML file apps that you can carry around on a USB drive or host on the web. The main trick to these apps is the same trick that TiddlyWiki uses, which is to construct a file in such a way that it can create an updated copy of itself and save it back to the server.

I'm attracted to this approach because it's a way to use relatively modern technologies in a way that is independent from giant corporations that want to hoover up all my data, while also being easy to hack and modify to suit my needs on a day-to-day basis.

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ustad ◴[] No.42464261[source]
Do have a link to all the single html file apps you have in mind?
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rpdillon ◴[] No.42465469[source]
I'm authoring two, One that's a keyboard based mnemonic launcher for accessing various websites. It's basically a way to have your bookmarks outside of the browser and quickly accessible. The other is a tabbed markdown document that can render static copies of itself.

The two projects out in the wild that natively work with this approach are TiddlyWiki and FeatherWiki.

I see room for a lightweight version of a calendar, a world clock, and even a lightweight spreadsheet that could be useful. I also have an idea for something I call a link trap where you can rapidly just drop links in and then search and sort over them to quickly retrieve something you saw before that was interesting. Sort of like my bookmarks-outside-the-browser except more of a history-outside-the-browser.

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mikae1 ◴[] No.42468660[source]
Is https://rpdillon.net/redbean-tiddlywiki-saver.html still what you're using?
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1. rpdillon ◴[] No.42471377[source]
I've been working on projects like this for some time and that particular project happened to make the Hacker News front page but was not the client files that I'm referring to here, but rather a server. It was a side project to play with a redbean, since I'm a fan of jart's work.

My primary saver is a Python script that I wrote called Notedeck, but I also sometimes use a Rust webdav server called dufs.

I haven't released either of my projects I'm working on that are the client files, otherwise I would have just linked them.