Gwtar: A static efficient single-file HTML format (opens in new tab)

Not the inverse, but for any SPA (not framework or library) developers seeing this, it's probably worth noting that this is not better than using document.write, window.open and simular APIs.

But could be very interesting for use cases where the main logic lives on the server and people try to manually implement some download- and/or lazy-loading logic.

Still probably bad unless you're explicitly working on init and redirect scripts.

I wonder if this is compatible with Claude Artifacts.

I made my own bundler skill that lets me publish artifacts https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/a49d53b6-93ee-4891-b5f1-9... that can be decomposed back into the files, but it is just a compressed base64 chunk at the end.

I guess the next question will be if it does work in environments that let you share a single file, will they disable this ability once they find out people are using it.

Neat! I didn't know about this either.

Php has a similar feature called __halt_compiler() which I've used for a similar purpose. Or sometimes just to put documentation at the end of a file without needing a comment block.

Sounds delicious for poisoning search engine crawlers and other bots…

Html is already a good single-file html format. Images can be inlined with data-uri. CSS and javascript have been inlineable since the very beginning. What more is needed? Fonts? Data-uri, once more.

Hell, html is probably what word processor apps should be saving everything as. You can get pixel-level placement of any element if you want that.

Agreed, I was thinking it's like asm.js where it can "backdoor pilot" [1] an interesting use case into the browser by making it already supported by default.

But not being able to "just" load the file into a browser locally seems to defeat a lot of the point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_pilot#Backdoor_pilo...

Could it be solved with a viewer program? Any static HTML server?

It sounds like it would be pretty easy to write a super simple app with a browser in it that you could associate with the file type to spin these up. IMO.

I mean `claude -p "spin up a python webserver in this directory please"` or alternately `python -m http.server 8080 --bind 127.0.0.1 --directory .` is not hard

Allowing more metadata might be useful. You can add anything to the manifest at build time as assets are not required to be loaded or ever used (because this is impossible to statically check). I suppose we'd have to define an official prefix like 'gwtar-metadata-*' with like a 'gwtar-metadata-screenshot' and 'gwtar-metadata-desciption'... Not obvious what the best way forward is there, you don't want to add a whole bunch of ad hoc metadata fields, everyone will have a different one they want. Exif...?

Multiple versions or multiple pages (maybe they can be the same thing?) would be nice but also unclear how to make that. An iframe wrapper?

I considered and rejected deduplication and compression. Those can be done by the filesystem/server transparent to the format. (If there's an image file duplicated across multiple pages, then it should be trivial for any filesystem or server to detect or compress those away.)

I don't think you can provide a URL to a WARC that can be clicked to view its content directly in your browser.

WARC is mentioned with very specific reason not being good enough: "WARCs/WACZs achieve static and efficient, but not single (because while the WARC is a single file, it relies on a complex software installation like WebRecorder/Replay Webpage to display)."

'efficiency' is downloading only the assets needed to render the current view. How does it implement range requests and avoid downloading the entire SingleFileZ when a web browser requests the URL?

> Does this verify and/or rewrite the SRI integrity hashes when it inlines resources?

As far as I know, we do not have any hash verification beyond that built into TCP/IP or HTTPS etc. I included SHA hashes just to be safe and forward compatible, but they are not checked.

There's something of a question here of what hashes are buying you here and what the threat model is. In terms of archiving, we're often dealing with half-broken web pages (any of whose contents may themselves be broken) which may have gone through a chain of a dozen owners, where we have no possible web of trust to the original creator, assuming there is even one in any meaningful sense, and where our major failure modes tend to be total file loss or partial corruption somewhere during storage. A random JPG flipping a bit during the HTTPS range request download from the most recent server is in many ways the least of our problems in terms of availability and integrity.

This is why I spent a lot more time thinking about how to build FEC in, like with appending PAR2. I'm vastly more concerned about files being corrupted during storage or the chain of transmission or damaged by a server rewriting stuff, and how to recover from that instead of simply saying 'at least one bit changed somewhere along the way; good luck!'. If your connection is flaky and a JPEG doesn't look right, refresh the page. If the only Gwtar of a page that disappeared 20 years ago is missing half a file because a disk sector went bad in a hobbyist's PC 3 mirrors ago, you're SOL without FEC. (And even if you can find another good mirror... Where's your hash for that?)

> Would W3C Web Bundles and HTTP SXG Signed Exchanges solve for this use case?

No idea. It sounds like you know more about them than I do. What threat do they protect against, exactly?

So this is like SingleFileZ in that it's a single static inefficient HTML archive, but it can easily be viewed locally as well?

How does it bypass the security restrictions which break SingleFileZ/Gwtar in local viewing mode? It's complex enough I'm not following where the trick is and you only mention single-origin with regard to a minor detail (forms).

I believe the idea is that it's not local. It's a very large file on an HTTP server (required for range requests) and you don't want to download the whole thing over the network.

Of course, since it's on an HTTP server, it could easily handle doing multiple requests of different files, but sometimes that's inconvenient to manage on the server and a single file would be easier.

Maybe this is downstream of Gwern choosing to use MediaWiki for his website?

It also doesn't work on desktop Safari 26.2 (or perhaps it does, but not to the extent intended -- it appears to be trying to download the entire response before any kind of content painting.)

The range requests are to offsets in the original file, so I would think that most cases of 'live' injection do not necessarily break it. If you download the page and the server injects a bunch of JS into the 'header' on the fly and the header is now 10,000 bytes longer, then it doesn't matter, since all of the ranges and offsets in the original file remain valid: the first JPG is still located starting at offset byte #123,456 in $URL, the second one is located starting at byte #456,789 etc, no matter how much spam got injected into it.

Beyond that, depending on how badly the server is tampering with stuff, of course it could break the Gwtar, but then, that is true of any web page whatsoever (never mind archiving), and why they should be very careful when doing so, and generally shouldn't.

Now you might wonder about 're-archiving': if the IA serves a Gwtar (perhaps archived from Gwern.net), and it injects its header with the metadata and timeline snapshot etc, is this IA Gwtar now broken? If you use a SingleFile-like approach to load it, properly force all references to be static and loaded, and serialize out the final quiescent DOM, then it should not be broken and it should look like you simply archived a normal IA-archived web page. (And then you might turn it back into a Gwtar, just now with a bunch of little additional IA-related snippets.) Also, note that the IA, specifically, does provide endpoints which do not include the wrapper, like APIs or, IIRC, the 'if_/' fragment. (Besides getting a clean copy to mirror, it's useful if you'd like to pop up an IA snapshot in an iframe without the header taking up a lot of space.)

the first thing i thought too

Have you https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/single-file/?

If you really just want the text content you could just save markdown using something like https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/llmfeeder/.

I find that 'save as' horribly breaks a lot of web pages. There's no choice these days but to load pages with JS and serialize out the final quiescent DOM. I also spend a lot of time with uBlock Origin and AlwaysKillSticky and NoScript wrangling my archive snapshots into readability.

Save as doesn't work on sites that lazy load.

> Just because is requires "special" zip software on the server?

Yes. A web browser can't just read a .zip file as a web page. (Even if a web browser decided to try to download, and decompress, and open a GUI file browser, you still just get a list of files to click.) Therefore, far from satisfying the trilemma, it just doesn't work.

And if you fix that, you still generally have a choice between either no longer being single-file or efficiency. (You can just serve a split-up HTML from a single ZIP file with some server-side software, which gets you efficiency, but now it's no longer single-file; and vice-versa. Because if it's a ZIP, how does it stop downloading and only download the parts you need?)

If those were guaranteed inaccessible, wouldn't a web browser be within its rights to optimize those away?

gwern is a legendary blogger (although blogger feels underselling it… “publisher”?) and has earned the right to self-aggrandize about solving a problem he has a vested interest in. Maybe he’s a megalomaniac and/or unemployed and/or writing too many words but after contributing so much, he has earned it.

Wow, thats one hell of a reaction to someone's blog post introducing their new project.

Its almost as if someone charged you $$ for the privilege of reading it, and you now feel scammed, or something?

Perhaps you can request a refund. Would that help?

What's up with the non-stop knee-jerk bullshit ad hom on HN lately?