So I am trying to develop a browser based 'app' that is similar to a catalog. The user can place orders and view items on this page. Right now it is made up of an HTML page, a CSS sheet, some Javascript and some PHP. Unfortunately this app can not be hosted on a server, and will the files will be directly sent to the user.
I don't want to directly send all of my code to the user, I want to make things simpler (and more hidden) by compiling all these scripts/sheets into one file that the user can just open in their browser.
I've considered doing the scripts and sheets inside inline HTML, but inline script have too many drawbacks and are bad practice.
Any suggestions on how to accomplish this? Should I not worry about it and make sure to instruct the user just to open up the HTML file?
Thanks.
Related
I have a webapp that let users place dots on sitemap and link them to images.
The web app uses Javascript, CSS, and HTML.
phase1
While the user is subscribed he uses a rich set of functionalities to:
add dots on the sitemap and link them to images
edit the dots: move, delete, link momultiple images etc ..
etc..
This is done via the website that hosts the webapp.
phase2
When the user ends the subscription, he gets a .zip file with the information that he created (sitemap, images, links between the sitemap and the images, etc..).
The user can then connect to the website that hosts the webapp, without signing in and get a subset of the functionalities (e.g. he can only click on the dots and see the linked images, but he can no longer edit the dots or add images).
I want to change phase2.
Instead of interacting with the webapp on the website, I want to "freeze" the webapp into a interactive-pdf, or h5p page that can be played independently without the webapp.
There are multiple reasons that motivate to do this:
the webapp is complex, so engaging with the webapp is prone to more errors.
If the small subset functionality of the final data, which boils down to showing the image when clicking on the hyperlink, can be done via h5p browsing, then the risks for runtime errors are greatly reduced.
the interactive-pdf or .h5p file can be browsed by variety of tools potentially even when being offline.
the end product can be re-designed to appear more simple.
My questions:
is it possible to programatically convert the Javascript, CSS, and HTML content into a interactive-pdf or .h5p page?
Every end-product will be different (e.g. by the number of dots, and their location in the sitemap) so having to manually create the .h5p page every time is not practical.
are there mobile apps (e.g. on Apple Store, or Google Play) that can read .h5p content locally, e.g. when the device is offline?
Thanks
EDIT:
Oliver Tacke, thank you for replying.
Up to few days ago, looking for a solution to my problem, I did not hear about h5p at all.
When looking into h5p, I see that
many comments rlated to h5p that is a bit old - from ~5/6 years ago.
h5p is frequently talked in context of education (e.g. Moodle)
when I filed the question I could not even find a tag for 'h5p'
I could not find forums for h5p in mainstream channels like Discourse or Slack
So I want to know if I'm in the right direction at all.
Is h5p a new thing that just takes time to pick up, or is it something that started a while ago and dwindlled down,
or maybe I'm wrong and it is currently more active than I think (I'm aware of h5p.org and I do see activity there).
Basically, I want to create interactive content that can work
ideally offline, or
online but with a mainstream browser/tool/website (i.e. without needing my special website)
In the design industry, I know there are interactive catalogues.
But I don't know if the user can download them and somehow (e.g. with an epub reader) read them.
Thanks
I don't know anything about creating PDFs programmatically, so I can only offer a partial answer for the H5P related part. Given the broad scope of your question, this may be acceptable as a comment.
H5P content follows a specification that is documented at https://h5p.org/documentation/developers/h5p-specification.
You would basically have to implement an H5P content type library (file) from the files that you are given by the service. I assume that the JavaScript and CSS files are always the same, then those could be reused directly (but potentially not legally). You would also have to add some more JavaScript that takes parameters and generates the HTML output that you get from the service. You would then have to model semantics.json to suit the parameters, and then you essentially have an H5P content type. You don't have to use the then available form based editor (which probably wouldn't make sense), but you could create the content.json file programmatically and put it into the H5P content file archive. To create that file programmatically, you'd have to create a converter that identities the parameters in the HTML file generated by that service and transform them into the H5P semantics/content format. Not sure if it made more sense to rather create an editor widget for H5P, so you wouldn't have to depend on the other service at all.
There are currently no known mobile apps that allow you to load and run H5P content. They are on the roadmap of the H5P core team, but I wouldn't expect them to work on those any time soon. There's the moodle app for the moodle LMS that allows to use H5P content offline, but it needs to be fetched from a moodle instance. There's Lumi that allows to run H5P content locally on Windows, MacOS and Linux, but not on Android or iOS. However, Lumi also allows to create single standalone HTML files from H5P content containing all the content and logic ready to play, so that would allow offline use on Android and iOS.
Background:
I need to allow users to create web pages for various products, with each page having a standard overall appearance. So basically, I will have a template, and based on the input data I need the HTML page to be generated for each product. The input data will be submitted via a web form, following which the data should be merged with the template to produce the output.
I initially considered using a pure templating approach such as Nunjucks, but moved to ReactJS as I have prior experience with the latter.
Problem:
Once I display the output page (by adding the user input to the template file with placeholders), I am getting the desired output page displayed in the browser. But how can I now obtain the HTML code for this specific page?
When I tried to view the source code of the page, I see the contents of 'public/index.html' stating:
This HTML file is a template.
If you open it directly in the browser, you will see an empty page.
Expectedly, the same happens when I try to save (Save As...) the html page via the browser. I understand why the above happens.
But I cannot find a solution to my requirement. Can anyone tell me how I can download/save the static source code for the output page displayed on the browser.
I have read possible solutions such as installing 'React/Redux Development Extension' etc... but these would not work as a solution for external users (who cannot be expected to install these extensions to use my tool). I need a way to do this on production environment.
p.s. Having read the "background" info of my task, do let me know if you can think of any better ways of approaching this.
Edit note:
My app is currently actually just a single page, that accepts user data via a form and displays the output (in a full screen dialog). I don't wish to have these output pages 'published' on the website, and these are simply to be saved/downloaded for internal use. So simply being able to get the "source code" for the dislayed view/page on the browser and saving this to a file would solve my problem. But I am not sure if there is a way to do this?
Its recommended that you use a well-known site generator such as Gatsby or Next for your static sites since "npx create-react-app my-app" is for single page apps.
(ref: https://reactjs.org/docs/create-a-new-react-app.html#recommended-toolchains)
If I'm understanding correctly, you need to generate a new page link for each user. Each of your users will have their own link (http/https) to share with their users.
For example, a scheduling tool will need each user to create their own "booking page", which is a generated link (could be on your domain --> www.yourdomain.com/bookinguser1).
You'll need user profiles to store each user's custom page, a database, and such. If you're not comfortable, I'll use something like an e-commerce tool that will do it for you.
You can turn on the debugger (f12) and go to "Elements"
Then right-click on the HTML tag and press edit as HTML
And then copy everything (ctrl + a)
I've recently started learning html and for my first project i'm trying to create an image gallery that takes every png file from a directory and frames them on one page.
I've managed to make a very simple gallery that displays the images in a grid pattern but i haven't been able to make it take images straight from a folder without doing it manually.
I'm probably getting ahead of myself with such a project but any help is welcomed.
Current code is on github here:
http://ronsoros.github.io/?f49ef4d23d14e2c204648514729a7d850f62cf13
Welcome to Stackoverflow and the world of web development. You're indeed getting a little ahead of yourself, but that's a great attitude.
To be able to fetch all the images from a folder automatically, you need a programming language. Javascript is one of those programming languages, but Javascript is client side.
Client side means that the code you've written is executed by the users' browser. This means that as long as the user has access to the folder with your images he/she is able to fetch all the images and display them on the webpage. Most servers, the computer your website is hosted on, take security measures to make sure that the user can't access a directory, only the contents. This means that the user cannot know how many images are in the directory.
Javascript is also very slow in doing this, as first the page needs to load; run the javascript; loop over every image in a directory; display them one by one; end the script.
So what you need is PHP, a serverside language. This will be run before the user gets the page, the server executes the code. This means that you have access to the folder containing the images and are able to loop over them, get the images and put them in HTML tags to send to the user with the page.
But PHP needs a lot more than just a .html file, it needs a .php file and your computer or server has to know about PHP and what to do with it.
If you want to learn more about PHP W3Schools has a great guide on the basics of PHP: https://www.w3schools.com/php/
But I recommend sticking with HTML and CSS right now and really try to understand how it works and why it does what it does.
Goodluck!
I am trying to have a single GAS project that changes its UI by serving up different HTML pages based on what the user clicks. I cannot figure out how to serve up different HTML from the script, replace the current browser page and retain state. Any help appreciated. Thank you.
I use two options:
Have a main page which has buttons or text areas with onchange set to a function which calls back to the server side and gets new page data, then replace the current page or a portion of the page, with the new page.
Pass parameters in the URL and have the server side doGet() parse the parameters and branch to load a given page based on these values.
I have used a combination of both of these effectively. Basically I have a div which has my "menu" and a div which is the section to be replaced. My menu changes and then data is sent back to the server to get the dynamic body. The HTML is returned and then I replace using innerHTML.
In the same code I offer the ability to pass menu values via the published URL. This allows me to go directly to some values if I so choose as I have a Google Site where we embed the script into pages and the menu selections may be specific to that page. It allows us to use an iFrame to show the web app and go directly to the pertinent interface.
With google.script.run you can run any script on the server from the html page. By communicating with the server you have access to PropertiesService which gives you the capability to store information between pages. Personally I like the HTML Service createHtmlOutput(html) because I can edit the html without having to edit a separate page.
I decided to answer your question here so that I could use the code section.
Question:
I am actually looking to avoid manipulating the HTML and serve up a
completely different HTML file stored in the project. How do I make
the page call the script again and replace itself with the new
content?
We I'm guessing that completely replacing the page is not really what you want because the user will suffer a page refresh. But you could create divs like this:
<style>#R01{display:none;}</style>
<div class="replaceable" id="R01"></div>
If you put all your replaceable content in divs like that then you can request content from the server via calls like this:
google.script.run
.withSuccessHandler(updateConversation)
.withFailureHandler(showStatus)
.getConversation();
and put the new content into the appropriate divs and then change the css with another pair and turn the old content off and the new content on. Thereby avoiding a page refresh. Don't forget to save the old data into the PropertiesService first. So I don't think changing the entire page is the way to go but I could be wrong. I think just changing some of the internal content will avoid the need for a total page refresh. If you want to change images you can avoid another download by using CSS Sprites
In Chrome Dev Tools you can edit and make persistent changes to style elements.
https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/workspaces
You can also edit any HTML from any site and preview it live, sort of editing any site including ones you don't own or have access to.
However, I want to persistently, for me at least, edit the HTML, not just the style elements. How can I do this?
More specifically, I want to change the URLs of the static resources as if they're on a CDN.
Now:
Request: http://www.targetsite.tld/
<html>
<img src="http://www.targetsite.tld/image1.jpg">
</html>
Goal:
Request: http://www.targetsite.tld/
<html>
<img src="http://testcdn.tld/targetsite.tld/image1.jpg">
</html>
Hosts file editing won't work as the initial request will then not resolve to the right server. I really want to load the document from the existing server, not save the entire source off somewhere, then edit that.
I've found this nodejs script but remain hopeful I could achieve something more simply on the client side within the browser.
http://www.deanmao.com/2012/08/28/modify-a-site-you-dont-own/
I probably need some kind of browser extension that allows me to tag certain dom element nodes, write some rewrites for them, save this profile and then reload the page.
Does something like this exist?
The answer is User Scripts. In particular, GreaseMonkey for FireFox and TamperMonkey for Chrome. These are browser add-ons/extensions which allow you to manipulate DOM elements on the pages you visit, using simple JavaScript to achieve your goals.
This route, I achieved my goal with one caveat:
The browser first parses the original HTML and hence then makes all the HTTP requests for the assets it finds on the original source page. Only then does the User Script manipulate the content. Any edits you make on-the-fly with your user script then gets loaded after the the original HTML. So in my case:
<img src="http://www.targetsite.tld/image1.jpg">
The original image gets requested from the original host. Then my user script in TamperMonkey manipulates the URLs, causing the browser to than also request my new img:
<img src="http://testcdn.tld/targetsite.tld/image1.jpg">
In other words, it doesn't so much replace the image, it duplicates the request, altering the second one. This, of course, has implications for performance measurements etc. So beware.