HTML Clay
  1. HTML Clay
  2. Docs
  3. The app
  4. Features overview

Features overview

The small guarantees HTML Clay makes about opening, saving, versioning, and files on disk, and the goals the app was built around.

HTML Clay does a few things and tries to do them exactly right. These are the small guarantees behind the app, and the goals it was built around.

Tiny things you might notice#

Small guarantees you would only find by looking for them.

  • Opening is read only. A file you open and never save is not changed.
  • HTML Clay does not inject a script. It adds a save token, a durable id, and one cookie before sending the page to your browser. It strips those additions before anything reaches disk.
  • A save replaces the whole file. HTML Clay writes and flushes a temporary file, then renames it over the target. On macOS and Linux, it also flushes the directory before reporting success.
  • Invalid bodies never reach disk. HTML Clay refuses empty bodies, anything that is not HTML, and anything over 50 MB.
  • Consecutive identical versions collapse. HTML Clay never stores the same content twice in a row.
  • Your own save does not echo back. The watcher suppresses the exact hash HTML Clay just wrote.
  • Half written files stay off screen. HTML Clay shows an outside change only after repeated reads return the same bytes.
  • A copied file gets a separate backup record from the original.
  • HTML Clay backs up an outside edit before saving over it. The save succeeds, and the outside version remains in Backups.
  • Opening a file leaves no permanent copy. If you open a file once and never save it, HTML Clay removes its history after a week.

Project goals#

  1. Self-saving HTML files — The file knows where it lives on disk. Edit and save without “Save As” dialogs or cloud storage.
  2. True portability — A .htmlclay file works offline, locally, with no infrastructure. Email it, Dropbox it, AirDrop it, git it.
  3. Low barrier for developers — Write HTML + a small JS save call + rename to .htmlclay. That’s it.
  4. One-click OS integration — File extension associates with the app. Double-click to open. No registration, no login.
  5. A project is one place — Trust a folder and every .htmlclay file in it opens editable at the folder’s own hostname on the app’s one port, an address that survives a restart, so links between them work and a bookmark keeps working.
  6. Platform potential — The same .htmlclay file could eventually run both locally and on a web hosting platform.