Macaroni – a single HTML file messenger

The idea isn’t that transport magically disappears. The idea is that users don’t have to deploy, operate, pay for, or even think about transport.

GitHub happens to provide one out of the box, which makes the proof of concept extremely easy to try.

If I need to run databases, message brokers, servers and monitoring just to send my mom “please cook macaroni”, I’ve already lost interest.

- you get a slower first load (cannot progressively fetch resources as they're needed) - can't reuse a stylesheet, script or image on a different page (each has to have their own copy) - can't cache commonly used files - can't make granular changes to specific parts of the code. user has to reload everything each time. - can't set a proper content security policy

And many more! It's cool for a tiny demo but for anything serious you wouldn't want a single (extremely ugly) HTML file.

That might just be an aesthetic choice on my part, but I often find that I am able to implement all the features I need in surprisingly few lines of code. e.g. the first version of my LLM UI was 200 lines and quite usable for my purposes.

And my OpenClaw clone was 50 lines. Just a Telegram wrapper around Claude, but turns out that's all I needed.[0]

Also no dependencies, frameworks, libaries etc. Not a hard rule, but I find that they add negative value about 90% of the time, at least at my scale.

There are dozens of us! :)

[0] Of course, "Claude Code" isn't 50 lines. Except, it turns out you can replace it in about 50 lines. From the SWE-bench folks: https://minimal-agent.com/

To this I added the missing outer loop (so it's actually an agent a human can use) and vendored in a microscopic llm lib (yay no deps). https://gist.github.com/a-n-d-a-i/bd50aaa4bdb15f9a4cc8176ee3...

Sure the JavaScript won't load in CSS or favicon mode, but it can be loaded into the Dom as well as exist in the CSS.

In my SVG file I have lots of CSS variables generated by the JavaScript, then saved as a big list in the SVG, enabling light/dark mode things. SMIL animation too.

This experiment is based on what you described, an all in one HTML file.

In that experiment the CSS was getting clumsy due to the amount of SVG I had in there, so I put the CSS in the SVG for fun.

As for why, I am creating a modern version of an Embroidery sampler. These existed from centuries ago and served as a portfolio of sorts plus a reference on different stitches, such as how to do the alphabet.

So my SVG sampler has examples of how to do tricky things in SVG, with all of it human drawable and readable, so no massive paths, just simple primitives, clipped, masked, transformed and cloned to create all my icons, logos and clipart.

I hope to make SVG samplers a thing, so one SVG file and one HTML file to illustrate how it all works.

To be honest it has been an excellent learning experience and I can now do so many things with just the MDN reference for SVG as my guide.

[1]: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/patching#f...

But what if that's exactly what I want to do?

This is talking politics without talking politics. The project literally attempts to circumvent russian censorship restrictions and their spirit. This is either a joke the file talks about or naive CYA.

Cool project nevertheless, I like idea of an utility SPA distributed as bare HTML file that doesn't even require a web server.

https://pastebin.com/raw/EPtJM5Dp

But once you reduce everything to Git + JSON, adding things like PGP, age, signatures, encrypted attachments, or end-to-end encryption becomes surprisingly easy.

Which makes it even funnier.

At first glance it looks like a toy.

After a few minutes you start asking:

“Wait… why does this actually make sense?”

I think the protocol is a bit underestimated. People see the joke before they see the architecture.

There are some surprisingly interesting properties hiding behind the absurdity.

Maybe it’s a hidden gem.

Or maybe I’m just rationalizing a messenger implemented as a single HTML file.