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

hyperclay.com

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

#31

Post by tommica »

dismalaf wrote: post #12
pavlov wrote: 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...

DevTools was not part of the original browsers. Firebug brought the concept to existence in the first place.

As a sidenote, does manipulating forms count as editing?

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

#32

Post by athrowaway3z »

bflesch wrote: post #21

I appreciate the storytelling and the nice graphics, but after reading 10 screen lengths of this story I still don't understand what technology they are using to achieve this. Is it a lot of words to talk about localstorage? How exactly are the changes persisted to the HTML file? Is it using FileSystemAPI to overwrite the previous HTML file? How can they implement it seamless for the user without them having to choos…

I'm also a bit lost after scrolling through it. It seems if we take this one step further and add a bit of syntax to HTML to be executed on the server you'll have invented PHP / WordPress right?

AFAICT this is another cycle of; a decent system becoming overcomplicated because someone wanted to make it multi-tenant, and the re-discovery that 90% of the "improvements/advancements" are essentially bloat in the context & freedom you find/create.

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

#35

Post by BoppreH »

For people who are confused: Hyperclay is a NodeJS server and frontend JS library that allows HTML pages to update their DOM and then replace their own .html source with the updated version.

Imagine clicking a checkbox, which adds the `checked` attribute to its element, then using Hyperclay to globally persist this version of `document.body.outerHTML`, so that it's there next time someone visits the page. There's automatic versioning and read/write permissioning.

It's a pretty cool project! I'll definitely try for my own personal tools.

Do note that, from my understanding, it's most useful when there's one developer who is also the only content editor. Otherwise you'll have editors overwriting each other's changes, and if there are multiple copies there's no easy for the developer to push a change to all copies.

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

#37

Post by leptons »

tommica wrote: post #31
dismalaf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

DevTools was not part of the original browsers. Firebug brought the concept to existence in the first place. As a sidenote, does manipulating forms count as editing?

>Firebug brought the concept to existence in the first place.

There were other browser "dev tools" before firebug.

https://www.otsukare.info/2020/08/06/browser-devtools-timeli...

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

#39

Post by leptons »

BoppreH wrote: post #35

For people who are confused: Hyperclay is a NodeJS server and frontend JS library that allows HTML pages to update their DOM and then replace their own .html source with the updated version. Imagine clicking a checkbox, which adds the `checked` attribute to its element, then using Hyperclay to globally persist this version of `document.body.outerHTML`, so that it's there next time someone visits the page. There's aut…

This all sounds like something from 2001. I was doing pretty much exactly this around 2001, using contenteditable with an IIS/JScript back-end.
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