Show HN: Make your HTML documents portable by converting images to Base64 (opens in new tab)

(freetools.dev)

5 pointszenull4y ago6 comments

6 comments

I made a tool like this called humble[0] with a CLI interface that base64 encodes and inlines everything in an HTML file, images, audio, video, CSS, JS, favicons, cursors. The file sizes will be large of course (base64 encoding incurs a 34% size penalty), but useful in cases where you want portable single file documents.

[0] https://github.com/assemblylanguage/humble

torstenvl4y ago

..... are they not portable otherwise? Are there platforms that can read an image format in embedded base64 but can't read it from a separate file?

iggldiggl4y ago

If you follow Google's official recommendations as to how file system access is supposed to work on Android, you can't resolve any relative paths with regards to files received from other apps.

So if you're e.g. using a file explorer (one app) to browse through your storage and then open an HTML file in a browser (a different app), then the browser is officially unable to resolve any relative paths in that HTML files, so no images, no links, no style sheets, no scripts, no nothing.

Jaruzel4y ago

If you Save a page via your browser, it[1] creates the .html file, plus a sub-folder of the same name with all the assets in. The html gets re-written to reflect the new file paths.

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[1] In Chrome, IE, an Edge definitely. Not sure about Firefox or Safari.

1 more reply

FerretFred4y ago

Yup, I already do this. Very useful. However, some of the larger images tend to take up a lot of space in the HTML document.

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