Are you suggesting it should be built in to a desktop environment and not a separate program? Why?
> how deeply cargo-culted that whole space is
Desktop environments? I don't understand this point at all.
> This should be trivially easy to implement without visiting the web.
By "should" are you critiquing the author, or do you not think it's easy for some reason?
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20120527201322/http://desktopsid...
This entire system could be done locally with a more "pliable" environment, but e.g. those of us who want something customizable would have to slog through bash scripts or emacs or something like that.
Instead of e.g. something that worked like the famed/mythical "modern Hypercard."
I thought you were saying that making this work offline should be trivial. I didn't realize you wanted to replace the entire dev process, to have the end user make their own version from scratch.
So my reply was talking about the ease of installing a program that was developed like this but for offline use, not the ease of make-your-own.
You're of course right that making your own has no easy solution here. But that's a separate problem from working offline, and the way you talked about both problems at the same time confused me.