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See also https://portable.fyi/ built with portable-php[1][2], "a single HTML document from a collection of Markdown files."
1. https://github.com/cadars/portable-php
SPAs display in a single HTML URL, but are themselves (typically) comprised of multiple elements, including many CSS, JS, and data elements which are fetched dynamically.
The example URL is a complete website within a single HTML document with no external dependencies and no further round-trip requests.
https://john-doe.neocities.org/
You can open that URL, disable networking, and browse the entire site to your heart's content.
If you open the file in a terminal browser (lynx, w3m, elinks[2], etc.), you'll see the full site presented at once, as a single page, without needing to specifically navigate between them (you can scroll the full site). Though the intra-site navigation itself still works --- it just doesn't reveal or hide sections.
Well, TiddlyWiki[1] has been going it for 17(!) years. It's a very mature, polished, and extensible engine for wikis, blogs, and personal knwledge bases.
The entire thing (including the editor!) is a single .html file. By default, even images are embedded.
For my ADHD Wiki[2], a resource that talks about ADHD with a copious amounts of relatable memes intertwined with the text, I chose to just use images in the same directory instead of embedding them; so you might need to do some work to download that page (I think File -> Save as.. can give you a readable static version on some browsers).
Anyway, somewhat surprising that people are stumbling into how much you can do with just one well-crafted .html file. Look ma, no node.js, no (no)SQL database, no nothing except for one file for one website (and that file isn't even that large, given what TiddlyWiki allows you to do).
TiddlyWiki can be run on node.js, but I don't see much reason to. If I want to make changes, I use the built-in editor, and then the "Save..." button generates me the .html of the updated version. Save it over the old one, upload over ftp, done. No deployment process to speak of.
And, at that, the feature set rivals (and, at times, exceeds) that of, say, Wikipedia.
(And for math nerds: it supports LaTeX via a KaTeX plugin. Maybe you can't copy-paste your entire thesis, but it's pretty damn close to real-time full-featured LaTeX).
[1]https://tiddlywiki.com/
[2]https://romankogan.net/adhd
The author of the site linked in the article suggests a couple of Markdown options for this on their blog page [1]. In this, they link a port of their website as a Jekyll theme [2].
1. https://john-doe.neocities.org/#blog
2. https://github.com/bradleytaunt/john-doe-jekyll
Here's a tool that helps builds these by "compiling" all files into one html file
https://github.com/sean7601/compileJS
Love this! Some time ago I created a tool to make similar one-page sites by parsing a markdown file: https://leoncvlt.github.io/imml/
It's also available as a library / on the command line: https://github.com/leoncvlt/imml