Experimenting with no-build Web Applications

Summary

Experimenting with no-build Web Applications Some years ago I build an eBook generator called Little Webby Press. It would pick a folder with Markdown files and turn them into an EPUB3 non-DRM eBook file and also a zip containing a static website for your book. The cool thing about Little Webby Press is that all the workflow happens on the client-side. There's no back end, no database, no user accounts. You drag and drop a folder, press a button, and it works. I used it to make some niche technical books in the past and since I don't keep analytics, I have no idea how many people have used it. Old version of LWP. I spent the recent years without writing any book, but recently, after developing BlogCat and writing The Web Should Be A Conversation, I have an itch to write a book about WebExtensions. Of course, I'd like to use my own eBook generator to write this book, and that is how I nerdsnipped myself into making a new eBook generator. There was nothing wrong with the old version of Little Webby Press. It was built by leveraging the following stack: Svelte 3 for the UI. BrowserFS to have a browser-side filesystem so I could leverage NodeJS file handling routines. Handlebars for the templates used by both eBook and website generation. JsZip to create the EPUB and the zip containing the website. Rollup and a gazillion plugins Taildwind and Daisy for CSS All in all a very common setup for like five years ago. The problem is that I don't like the current version of Svelte and I really dislike the current web development ecosystem with its reliance on transpilation and too many frameworks and dependencies and build steps. Feels like we're developing in a fantasy version of JS that no engine is really able to run. I hate that. So instead of writing the book I want to write, I decided to rewrite Little Webby Press in a stack that is more suitable to my own enjoyment. New LWP. The new Little Webby Press My main objective with the new version was to eliminate the build step...