What I'm implementing here is mirroring a whole website, with all its subpages, so you can browse it all offline. For example, all essays from paulgraham.com.
I think the misunderstanding stems from the browser's "Save As" reference in the description. It is misleading. You use "Save As" to save a single page, not an entire website.
Also, the description lacks a clear explanation of the project's purpose. It would be helpful to include a sentence explaining that the program downloads an entire website, not just a single page.
I highly recommend reading the singlefile source or https://archiveweb.page/ to see how they handle closed shadow DOMs, cross-origin iframes, websockets, media urls, deduping large assets, etc.
Not the same thing, but I made a clone of pg’s website which can be used for exactly that: https://github.com/shawwn/pg
If you want to read all essays, just clone the repo and open any of the .html files. Or any of the .page files which generated them.
That said, Kage looks promising if OP can combine SingleFile reproduction quality with the HTTPTrack spidering approach. SPA's are kinda tricky with archiving and do wonder how well Kage would handle that
For some reason it displays in IE better but I don't recall seeing this option in chrome of Firefox recently..
That way, the page is self-contained as it is, but requires no bundled binary code to serve the site. It is actually safer security-wise.
The vendored script can be as simple as this:
const site = {
"path-1": "<!DOCTYPE html><html> ... </html>",
"path-2": "<!DOCTYPE html><html> ... </html>",
// More paths
}
function attachListeners() {
for (const [path, html] of Object.entries(site)) {
document.querySelector(`a[href=${path}]`).onclick = () => {
document.documentElement.outerHTML = html
attachListeners()
}
}
}
document.addEventListeners("DOMContentLoaded", attachListeners)Let's say you have a site that fetches content from a database. If you Save As, then at best you'll get a local copy of an HTML page with JS that loads the content from the same remote database. It might not work (since the local copy has a different origin), or if it does, it requires you to be online, which defeats half of the purpose.
What this project, and SingleFile, both do is save a snapshot of what the rendered page actually looks like at that moment in time. The scripts are stripped out so it runs locally and has no external dependencies.