Comment by wolttam
1 day ago
One use I'd have for this is company wikis that you want to give folks easy offline access to (maybe the wiki has documentation that's useful at sites that don't have cellular coverage).
Cool!
It would be especially cool to have a version that didn't require the separate serving process - even though it's nifty you can package up a whole site as a single binary.
Maybe a single HTML entrypoint shim with a bit of javascript that could index into an archive (potentially embedded) of the site's content?
Submitting this to Hacker News is the right place! Thanks for your idea. I will consider implementing that :)
Also, in my mind, I already have a script/program to convert HTML to Markdown, so it could actually store everything on disk as a folder of Markdown files, and then commit them to a Git repo.
I'd like to request something between what GP suggested and what your program is doing currently - basically I still want a single binary, but instead of embedding a full browser in it, I would like the binary to be just a self-extracting archive that calls the user's default browser, maybe in a new window/frame.
Basically I'm looking for something like the old-school .chm files on Windows, where you could pack a bunch of HTML documents into a single archive and open it without needing to embed a full browser engine.
This would have the advantage of keeping the file sizes really small. And you don't have to worry about the browser engine become outdated and potentially becoming an attack vector.
I instantly searched for chm on the comments and yours was the only one :o
2 replies →
I think the zim flow was perfect for offline use. I know I will be making use of it as soon as I can figure out how to pass chrome the cookies so I can be signed into the site. Didn't see it in the page, but I didn't look closely yet.
Not yet supporting cookies, since I created this tool for shadowing public websites first. I will add options to pass cookies later. It will pass them to the underlying Chrome/Chromium process, so it should not be hard to do.
Not to load you up with too many ideas, but a markdown folder sounds a lot like obsidian, which has a plugin system now.
Epub would also be a great target.
I would use the shit out of this. I'm a heavy user of Logseq (OG, the md file-based version). Would LOVE to save my favorite web resources this way.
This is a nice way to do it if you’re already stuck with a solution (print to PDF would probably also, if you can script it).
In a green field world, I have a personal requirement that technical documentation systems are capable of bulk exporting to a human-readable format on disk. I’m pretty flexible on what that is, though. Markdown is preferred, but I’m also fine with static, dependency-free HTML and I could accept PDFs if the rest of it is super nice.
It’s an integral part of DR, and most places want their docs on-premise, so DR effectively requires offline documentation. Everywhere I’ve worked either a) writes documentation in something that works offline (eg git repo with tarballs somewhere), or b) has invested a bunch of time in trying to scrape their own wiki into something legible during DR.
I guess it’s a long-winded way of saying “that’s using a tool to fix a self-inflicted problem that shouldn’t exist”.
> Maybe a single HTML entrypoint shim with a bit of javascript that could index into an archive (potentially embedded) of the site's content?
So something like SingleFileZ https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFileZ or Gwtar https://gwern.net/gwtar ?