[stephengillie]

> your site is just a file. For local use you don't even need a webserver.

This is true for this new system as well. The browser engine is only needed to write JSON to the DOM, since browsers don't natively read JSON. You could host both on your SSD and point a webpage at them. (XHR caching is a to-do item.)

S3 is used because it's relatively common and trusted. Node (or any server) is just used to facilitate writing to S3. Node specifically is used because it's simpler to develop everything in one language, and that's the only language that runs in browsers.