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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

#41
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.

I had never heard of Amaya before.

> It supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, XHTML Basic, XHTML 1.1, HTTP 1.1, MathML 2.0, many CSS 2 features, and SVG.

Perfect. Doesn't need anything else.

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

#42
post #37
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Crazy - I had forgotten about the earlier ones! The IE one I used at some point, and fiddler too

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

#43
post #38
post #36

Someone rediscoved Windows 98 HTA archives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application

The original Electron! Pity the versions of IE it was available for were still hell to debug in.

Back in those days you had to install the Office Scripting Debugger, I think that was the name, when browser debuggers were still extensions.

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

#46
This is just awesome! But seems like a closed source project, and the pricing page returns HTTP 404.

Are there any open source alternatives like this? First time I hear about this idea. However, I can imagine it wouldn't take much effort to implement the basics. Chromium even has a design mode you can activate by typing `document.designMode='on'` in the console. Then you would just need to write a little javascript that handles auth, a save button, and a backend to persist the altered html.

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