I finally got a new website going (I've got :spark...
# share-your-worke
Ezhik
03/09/2025, 5:23 PMI finally got a new website going (I've got ✨RSS✨ now!) and figured out a relatively painless way to actually put little apps on it and stuff.
So I went and tried to see if I could make a little spreadsheet functional visual programming environment without consulting any info on the topic and managed to make a working one.
I actually don't know what's the more interesting project to me to share, that I finally have a sandbox for little prototypes, or the little prototypes themselves.
https://ezhik.jp/spreadsheet-1/
Ezhik
03/09/2025, 5:24 PMThe most liberating thing for me has been to go with the flow and just do it even if I'm using dirty tricks like
evalm
Marek Rogalski
03/09/2025, 6:22 PM+1. There is some prejudice about eval related to security but as long as you keep that attack vector in mind, it's a pretty awesome tool. One of the simplest and most powerful features of JavaScript
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xyzzy
03/10/2025, 4:45 AMone of the apis I wish html / js had was allowing access to local folders.
It should not be that difficult to sandbox it securely.
Every website -> 1 local folder on the hard drive and it can access only that. Just like browsers can remember credit card information, they can remember and secure a folder for each website.
This would largely kill the need for cloud providers of storage and many sass services.
Spreadsheets / Docs and many apps can be served online while accessing truly local files and storage.
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Ezhik
03/10/2025, 3:54 PMopfs is kinda sorta a step in that direction, i suppose.
Ezhik
03/10/2025, 3:56 PMchrome apparently actually does allow accessing a folder but that's not cross-browser: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/showDirectoryPicker
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Federico Pereiro
03/10/2025, 4:42 PMImplementing a spreadsheet is a lot of fun! I did a very basic one and still learned a lot from it.
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Ezhik
03/11/2025, 3:58 PMOne more spreadsheet experiment: what if it wasn't just the cells themselves that could have formulas but things like cell styling too?
https://ezhik.jp/spreadsheet-2/
Ezhik
03/11/2025, 3:59 PM(pls let me know if i'm excel-ing this place too much, though i'm starting to think #C03RR0W5DGC might be the more fitting place so i'll post further instances there i think)
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Christopher Shank
03/11/2025, 11:17 PMI like where this is going! Any thought on how to select the cell to style?
Christopher Shank
03/11/2025, 11:19 PM(Curious because I'm been exploring what it would look if spreadsheets were backed into HTML. Which opens up a bunch of things like this as well! For example being able to take a spreadsheet an morph it into a dependency graph https://folk.systems/canvas/spreadsheet-graph-projection)
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Ezhik
03/12/2025, 12:15 AMOh that is cool. I actually want to add some graph visualizations too eventually. Really like the look you have for that!
I think I like the idea of doing it with formulas, so you use the same mode of thinking for both the cell value and for any other property it might have.
Though if we want to go beyond cells, like doing buttons, for example, we might need to have some ability to do event handlers/effects.
Interesting how this aligns pretty well with the React model, for example.
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Christopher Shank
03/13/2025, 10:18 PMya i think some kind of new expression for side effects would be needed!
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Federico Pereiro
03/16/2025, 7:29 PM@Dan Swirsky styling in formulas sounds a lot like Hilltop!
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Dan Swirsky
03/16/2025, 8:43 PMYup. It's spreadsheets all the way down!