THE GITHTML FIELD GUIDE
Inventory an HTML document’s offline dependencies
An HTML file is not necessarily a complete document package. Inspect its references to stylesheets, images, fonts, scripts, frames, and neighboring pages, then classify each dependency as essential or optional. For dependable portable reading, keep essential prose in the markup and prefer inline CSS over a chain of remote presentation resources.
Look beyond the HTML filename
A page can contain only the structure while loading its appearance and meaningful content elsewhere. Open the source and inspect resource references, including stylesheet links, image sources, script sources, and embedded frames. Also look for CSS that loads fonts or background images.
If a generator produced the page, inspect its output directory as a collection. Copying index.html alone may omit most of what the generator expects to find beside it.
Build a dependency ledger
For each dependency, record its location, purpose, whether it is required for understanding, and how you will handle it. Example entries might be a decorative web font, an essential architecture diagram, and a remote search service.
Choose a treatment based on importance. A decorative font can usually fall back to system fonts. A critical diagram needs a portable representation and a text explanation. A live search service needs a different navigation route when the network is unavailable.
- Inspect HTML and CSS resource references.
- Classify dependencies as essential or optional.
- Verify every essential dependency in the disconnected reading environment.
Distinguish local from available
A relative asset path means the reference is relative to a base location; it does not prove the referenced file was downloaded or can be resolved by the destination reader. Verify the file and the reader’s actual behavior.
gitHtml should not be treated as an automatic mirror of all CSS, images, and JavaScript in a repository. Its HTML indexing and the availability of linked resources are different matters. Test the pages in the intended reading environment.
Validate the reduced document
Remove or replace optional dependencies in your authoring workflow, then check that the page remains legible and complete. Use the network-disconnected state as part of the check, not merely a browser window that may still reuse previously loaded resources.
The resulting inventory should explain every essential dependency and any accepted limitation. If the document still requires a server or application runtime, label it as such and provide a simpler companion reading copy for the task that must work offline.
Sources and further reading
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