| You could literally run the Golang compiler in your browser if you wanted to (emphasis on in your browser—not deferring to a server to do the heavy lifting) without any of that stuff. A lot of the stuff that people think they need Chrome's proposed filesystem APIs for are not actually things they need. Every mainstream browser accepts directories for both type=file inputs and for drag-and-drop, and that's been the case for years. So that's a non-issue. That aside, the next thing people pretend they need it for is so their app foo.html won't fail when it tries to read and write to or from ~/.foo and /etc/foo and anywhere else the author chooses, whenever they want. But apps can and should be rewritten not to expect that kind of ambient capability. The fact that in-browsernapps can't do that stuff is a good thing. There's usually nothing stopping the author from refactoring their program to either output a single binary file or .txt or whatever the main thing is that the program is supposed to output, or if the purpose is to write out multiple assets, then output a composite file format like ZIP or tar. I mean owing to its history and the context when it was created, the ZIP format already supports archives spanning multiple volumes/files. And that gets you automatic support for file versioning for free! It's the exact same version control strategy that Git uses and proved is viable: full-content snapshots—the difference being if you're doing ZIP, the opportunity to also use DEFLATE is natural and right there. > Only thing missing really is a CLI interface. If you want people to be able to use it from the command-line, write your app as a polyglot file foo.htm so that anyone can double click to open in their browser if they want to or run it as `nodejs foo.htm` since NodeJS doesn't care about file names but browsers do (for any files loaded from disk). If you want to "pass through arguments as [query string] params", then you're opening it in the browser and not really providing a command-line interface so there's very little difference between having them type the arguments out in their shell before pressing Enter or typing them into the app when it's open in the browser. Again this is one of those things where nothing's stopping anyone from doing it right now today. They're just not doing it. As the Book Overflow guys said in a recent episode (the review of Wolfram's book on ChatGPT)—all the pieces are there. Or to borrow a turn of phrase from Raskin that gets down to the truth of the mess we're in[1], "none of this is necessary; it is merely customary"[2]. 1. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4> 2. <https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=864034> |
Recently. I wanted to organize around a thousand short videos. I looked into software and the solutions were really integrated, media library etc. MacOS has tagging in the filesystem, but that ties me to an operating system, and didn't give me the explore related function. I wanted something that could let me browser a folder with added metadata, explore related clips etc.
After looking at all the options I could find, I realized it was easier to just build myself a little Node.JS app using sqlite for metadata, it worked great. I plugged in local ollama and whisper for transcriptions and automatic tagging, which worked suprisingly well. It's annoying needing to run a server for such a simple app, packaging it is just so heavy ... and I thought, it's really not that far off being something I could do in a single HTML file, it was pretty much just the filesystem access - then my app/content is just a folder that does what I want to on any platform without installations or configuration.
Thanks for linking the Joe Armstrong lecture, I've watched half and its wonderful.