Hacker News Reader

SingleFile, right?

Edit:

On that note, what's up with the Firefox Add-Ons?

Currently, they are all setup so that to do something interesting, they need all the permissions.

Which leads to a natural market being created, of bad actors go shopping for Add-Ons they can take over.

Can something be done about this? For instance for this "SingleFile" addon. It needs to access the rendered document in the DOM to be able to introspect and save it all to a file.

But why does it need access to everything? Can't it have just permissions:

- "snapshot DOM once"

- "write to a single file"

Agree. There are many extensions that I want to use on arbitrary websites, but rarely. This could be handled by the browser locking the extension out from everything, until the moment I manually invoke it, at which point it’s allowed access to the page I’m currently looking at.

Now, maybe that’s how it already works, but I have no confidence in it.

Author here, I wished SingleFile would use less permissions, but it's unforntunately not possible from a technical point of view. Anyway, if you run some code I've written but are suspicious, you have to trust me or review the code which is open-source.

SingleFile is amazing - one of my most-used extensions on both desktop and mobile by far. It’s elegant, unobtrusive and it just works. Thanks for making!

Thank you for trusting me and for your kind words ;)

I use SingleFile ALL the time. Thank you so much for it.

I Perma-web anything that I find interesting, after discovering by going back in my notes that half the bookmarks I'd added no longer existed 5 years later.

I don't think I could do half as good a job if it wasn't for your extension.

I owe you a coffee/beer -- actually i just found your donation page, but still a drink IRL if we ever run into each other at a conference/etc.

Thank you very much for your support! I've just read your post about SingleFile and Obsidian [1]. I'm glad to see that you've managed to integrate SingleFile perfectly into your workflow :)

[1] https://vertis.io/2024/01/26/how-singlefile-transformed-my-o...

It's the least I could do :)

I have no qualms about you or SingleFile. I used it today, it's great!

I just think market pressure created by the permissions systems is unfortunate, in aggregate. With x thousands of add-ons, bad stuff has happened, and is going to happen. Any improvement to the permissions which could mitigate that at least somewhat, would be nice.

SingleFile, yes. Thanks. Did not see it within the edit-window.

I agree about permissions. In this case it looks like it needs a bit more, since it has some options like enabling auto-save after page-load for tabs for instance. Not a feature I have used, but I am sure it can be useful for semi-manually scraping sites.

> I use the SinglePage add-on for Firefox (think it is available for Chrome as well?) to save the current page DOM to HTML as a self-contained file (inlined CSS and data:-URLs for all images) with no dependencies and all the scripts removed etc. It is not perfect, and I do not trust browsers to always remain backwards compatible, but I prefer it to save pages as PDF or as multiple files.

Ha, I think that one of my first HN comments, 10 years or so ago, was how I wanted to be able to save HTML web pages as HTML, not as PDF. I'm sure I didn't explain (or understand) my reasoning well, but it was roundly regarded as a ludicrous thing to want to do. I'm glad to hear that I was just a decade out of sync.

Actually, the first release of SingleFile is 13+ years old but it was less popular at the time because Chrome (it didn't yet support MHTML) had a negligible market share. People generally saved their pages in MAFF or MHTML format in Firefox or IE. It was when Firefox abandoned XUL extensions that SingleFile was able to rise from the ashes, because there was once again a real interest in it.

Another comment explains why the page is difficult to parse:

  > It's a very well thought through article by the developer of Nota, trying to bring EPUB format up to parity with PDF. It's a serious start and they've already written a viewer. In fact, the article itself is displayed in a browser-based wasm port of the viewer (and looks good!).

FBReader uses CSS from the document by default; you can turn it off in, IIRC, four stages.

KOreader gives you more control but in a less friendly manner: in addition to choosing specific CSS from several supplied files, you can write your own.

(Also wins for KOreader: excellent OPDS support, and easy self-hosted sync server.)

Yes, but this article has an EPUB download button.

This feature makes SinglePage unnecessary for any page using this system.

Funny, my misspelling sometimes also. I suppose this has something to do with probabilities inside our brain, the phrase "Single page" might be more probable than "Single file" (Hmm, I smell some similarities to LLM probabilities).

On a side note, what is interesting with SingleFile is that since the file can contain anything including JS, it's possible to create a local "executable" (html) that uses the resources inside the file and does not use a single external file. I have an actual game-like piece that runs locally with bunch of files and comparatively easily transforms into a single self-running "program" that even runs on a mobile file manager with WebView support