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Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file

hyperclay.com

11–20 of 240 posts

Re: Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file

#11

Very nice concept! I've been thinking for a while that the web really suffers from not having a built-in concept of (ideally fairly anonymous) identity. I shouldn't need to maintain a whole authentication system and a database full of PII just to let you see the same data across your laptop and your phone...

You mean HTTP auth?

Re: Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file

#12
post #5

This is coming close to WWW's original vision because the very first web browser was also an editor. Tim Berners-Lee's application on the NeXT was basically a wrapper for the operating system's built-in rich text editing class named TextView. (It later became NSTextView on Apple's Mac OS X and still powers the TextEdit app on Mac.) We lost editing for two reasons: 1) The HTTP PUT method didn't exist yet, so edited HT…

> web browser was also an editor

Ummmm all the browsers I know of are also editors... Are there any that aren't?

Edit - does no one use dev tools anymore? No HTML? No vanilla JS and CSS? Everyone just using TS, React and gluing things together? Like, you literally have an entire IDE in your browser (assuming you use anything derived from Chrome, Firefox or Safari) that can code a web page live...

Re: Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file

#13
post #5

This is coming close to WWW's original vision because the very first web browser was also an editor. Tim Berners-Lee's application on the NeXT was basically a wrapper for the operating system's built-in rich text editing class named TextView. (It later became NSTextView on Apple's Mac OS X and still powers the TextEdit app on Mac.) We lost editing for two reasons: 1) The HTTP PUT method didn't exist yet, so edited HT…

Making a more read/annotate/write web is near and dear to my heart. There's a lot I find admirable - noble about pages like Hyperclay!

But also, it's a distinctly different answer for each page to build its own toolkit for the user (Hyperclay) vs TBL's read-write web. The user-agent ought, imo, afford standard tools that are going to work across web pages, that extend the user agency whatever site they are visiting.

Re: Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file

#14
Interesting idea. Well put it on the list of things I should try some day.

After a quick look at the site, I like the idea. But I wonder where it's limitations start to get in the way.

How about security, if I can modify the page, who else can? And who controls that?

How much code and logic does it handle before getting difficult to maintain? And how much data?

If I make an useful app with it, say to track beers, can I share the app with other people without so they can track their own beers, without sharing my personal data?

Re: Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file

#15
This is really neat! It echoes many of the ideas we've been exploring with the Webstrates project (https://webstrates.net). We've been using the DOM as persistence layer for building malleable collaborative software for smaller groups, whereas hyperclay focuses on using the same mechanisms for traditional webpages. Recently, I have been experimenting with a local-first approach to Webstrates (https://github.com/Webstrates/MyWebstrates). Might be interesting to explore if a Webworker-based approach like in MyWebstrates could be used for offline editing in hyperclay.

Re: Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file

#16
post #6

Very good. I was wondering why nobody did something like that before. At least this was my conclusion from my google searches few months ago. From a design perspective, I don't like storing state in the DOM itself, I would have find much more flexible to have the state in a json as a single source of truth and use reactive patterns such as state change => ui change and not hiting the DOM directly. That sounds like bi…

Also our Webstrates (https://webstrates.net) system stores state in the DOM itself. But it's more a system for research prototyping than publishing web pages.

Re: Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file

#17
post #5

This is coming close to WWW's original vision because the very first web browser was also an editor. Tim Berners-Lee's application on the NeXT was basically a wrapper for the operating system's built-in rich text editing class named TextView. (It later became NSTextView on Apple's Mac OS X and still powers the TextEdit app on Mac.) We lost editing for two reasons: 1) The HTTP PUT method didn't exist yet, so edited HT…

To add to that the W3C maintained the Amaya "browser", or web editor how they liked to call it, for like a decade and a half, as their vision for the web.

I think it was not just an appealing idea but Amaya itself was a solid implementation for a "testbed" (again, their words).

I can see why it died but I still think it is a bit of a shame it did.

Re: Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file

#20
post #11

Very nice concept! I've been thinking for a while that the web really suffers from not having a built-in concept of (ideally fairly anonymous) identity. I shouldn't need to maintain a whole authentication system and a database full of PII just to let you see the same data across your laptop and your phone...

You mean HTTP auth?

HTTP auth is not an authentication system, it only describes how credentials should be passed from the client to the server and how the server should respond to them.
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