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Comment by bashtian

20 hours ago

The problem is that you can't save the user data in way that you can click a single file, similar to a Word or Excel file. I you think a about it, a Excel spreadsheet is also just UI + data in a single file.

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bashtian

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paweladamczuk  19 hours ago

This is a frustration of mine as well, but I vaguely remember someone showing something on HN where the file could essentially save itself, I think they were using some file APIs for that... sadly I can't find the details anymore. But I keep running into the "HTML file opened locally can't update itself" issue repeatedly now that I build tools for myself with LLM agents.

  • yoz  18 hours ago

    The File System Access API can do this, and it works in local ("file:///") HTML files, but it's only currently supported in desktop Chromium browsers: https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api

    However, every browser will let you download a new version of the HTML file and save it over the old one - yes, even from a local HTML file:

       const blob = new Blob(['<!DOCTYPE html>\n' +
      document.documentElement.outerHTML], 
      { type: 'text/html' });
   const a = document.createElement('a');
   a.href = URL.createObjectURL(blob);
   a.download = 'mypage.html';
   a.click();

    ... but you need the user to do this for every update. So we're back to manual "Save" buttons.