How to deliver a site without putting it online

[damithc]

Let's say someone created some content as a website (e.g., a teacher creating a MarkBind site for her course). Is there a way to deliver that to intended recipients without hosting it as a public website?. For example, send the site to the students of the course only for offline viewing.

Of course, one way is to zip up the site and send to recipients. I'm wondering if there is a more convenient way that doesn't require unzipping an archive and ending up with a whole lot of files.

To give an analogy, people can download an ebook as one file and read it using an eBook reader device/app. Most devices have a browser already that can read a website; we just need to deliver the site in a convenient way. Any ideas?

[Chng-Zhi-Xuan]

Something like a packaged app? There are a few open source options to convert a website to an app.

Desktop App: nativefier WebDGap

Android App: WebToApp

I did not study in-depth which is the best for MarkBind, so other suggestions are welcome.

[kaixin-hc]

After using revealJS (make slides in HTML and share them as a website), it seems the sharing of the slides can also only be done with a zipped up folder, or with a PDF export. Then the slides can be seen by clicking index.html . The difference with sharing the markbind folder is that the student would have to have markbind installed and run markbind serve (more steps and hence inconvenient).

Converting website to app sounds pretty troublesome to me - we'd need to make sure it runs on various OS, and I personally hate the idea of downloading an app just to see one particular set of content. With the book analogy, the nice thing about epub is its a recognisable format you can view with many different readers/send around your diff devices, which doesn't really apply to an app. (Though the advantage I suppose would be this would also be a one-step process to click to open an app, I could see people easily running into issues with it not being supported on certain versions, etc)

I think if future batches wanted to support this, they could also look into enhancing PDF export (Exporting the whole website as a set of PDF or making that easier could be useful for course guides, textbooks, references etc) or figuring out an export command which allows the recipient to just double-click a HTML file to open as website.