Self-viewable projects // Include copy of the latest Crystal binary in every .crystalproj

[davidfstr]

From a digital preservation standpoint, it would be useful if a .crystalproj found on some archival media was immediately viewable, without having Crystal installed beforehand.

Thus I suggest:

• [x] Extending the README inside the .crystalproj to say something like "This downloaded website can be viewed by opening "Crystal Viewer" (.app, .exe, no extension) in the current directory, or through the full Crystal program available at https://dafoster.net/projects/crystal-web-archiver "
• [ ] Actually including a "Crystal Viewer" binary in the .crystalproj.
  • Perhaps this is just the regular Crystal binary, where Crystal is modified to see whether it is running inside a .crystalproj and self-opens automatically in that situation (and perhaps has other default behaviors).

[davidfstr]

Priority: Low

I think from a preservation standpoint it might make more sense to invest in topic-export functionality (i.e. the ability to explicitly export a .crystalproj to a different more-archival-friendly format such as raw HTML/CSS/JS files in a directory hierarchy).

[davidfstr]

It would be great if the Crystal binary included was compiled as an Actually Portable Executable (APE), which is likely to be runnable on multiple operating systems a long time into the future.

Such an executable should be able to do most things that the regular version of Crystal already does:

• run a Python interpreter
  • read from a .sqlite database
• open a server socket and run a web server that serves the contents of the .crystalproj

But it will be necessary to work around some limits of APEs:

• no GUI support (i.e. no wxPython)
  • -> use a web UI only
  • -> use a TUI (like Textual or Rich)
• might not be able to open a web browser automatically (i.e. the webbrowser module might not work)
  • -> print a console message telling the user to manually open a web browser to a particular starting URL