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Comment by adamddev1 | Hacker News Reader

That could easily be made into a PWA that people could save and view offline. I've been doing this with create-react-app and markdown files (muuuch bulkier solution) but it's an offline docs-like SPA people can click around with interactive examples and shareable links etc. Seems like offline availability was not a priority for other docs-making tools like docosaurus etc (last time I checked)

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Please, don't make me run React to read your document, and don't make my device parse Markdown and generate HTML on each visit. This is wasteful. I and the planet should not suffer because you decided to author your book using Markdown (which is a fine format, but my browser does not understand it natively). A virtual book is best served as plain old static HTML pages. Shareable links is indeed an impressive feature, but it has been a given on the Web since 1991, I think we don't need to be impressed by it in 2021.

You can add some JS here and there for the few really interactive elements of the document but my browser already has all the features to render documents and links perfectly fine. People have been able to "click around" since 1991 and we never needed to download, parse and execute 2MB of JS for this.

Your book is probably big, and I'm probably not reading it in one go, so if it includes images and videos, downloading it all is probably unnecessary and the book is probably best split in several HTML pages. If you want to allow me to consult it offline, that's very kind and noble. Just put a zip file somewhere I can download.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm a bit fed up by having to download run megabytes of Javascript I can't control (and even read, because yay, bundles!!) to browse the web, just because.

> If you want to allow me to consult it offline, that's very kind and noble. Just put a zip file somewhere I can download.

To play devil's advocate: a majority of web traffic is on phones and tablets now, especially for long-form content where you will frequently see people request a page on a desktop, then request it two minutes later from a phone or tablet where they can read it more comfortably. 99% of mobile users will be happier when a text-heavy site is a PWA that caches itself, rather than a static HTML site that asks them to download a zip file, install an app to work with zip files on their device, unzip it to a folder of hopefully-relevantly-named HTML files, and then browse those, in the process breaking link sharing, link navigation (depending on OS), cross-device reading and referencing of highlights/notes, site search, and so on. Not to mention the limitations imposed on file:/// URIs, like browser extensions not working on them by default, which is a real problem for users relying on them for accessibility (e.g. dyslexia compensation, screen reader integration, stylesheet overrides). A lot of times that won't even be possible on a dedicated reading devices; my ereader will cache PWAs but will not download arbitrary files, if you make your site a PWA I can read it during my commute, if you make it static HTML with a zip file I can't. These are features most users appreciate a lot more than not having to load a 60k JS bundle (current size of React gzipped).

You want offline viewing?

Chrome: File > Save Page As... > Webpage, Complete

Safari: File > Safe As... > Web Archive

My god, it's just text files and images, you don't need JavaScript.

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