In the first few of years of TiddlyWiki (mid/late '00s), the way it worked was that you just had a local copy of your tiddlywiki.html. You just opened it in a browser, and did your editing. Then you could just click the save button inside the page. And the page was saved to disk. This worked on every desktop browser.

Obviously, generically letting webpages, even local ones, have this sort of access to disk had lots of security implications. So, eventually all browsers removed this functionality. Now, you need all these extensions or tools to save the file.

You can do it with Chromium browsers using the native file system access API. Unfortunately, I think Firefox didn’t actually read the whole spec and Apple doesn’t like it because it cuts into their App Store revenue.

Or you can set it up to make a git commit instead of saving to a local file.

Oh, wow, if you just set up git+https with CORS, then you could push to a git remote from a browser. That's real interesting.

Yep, that's where you get tools like Netlify CMS: https://v1.netlifycms.org/

what was the api like back then that let a webpage write to storage? Was it just calling the browser’s “save webpage” thing? And storing the state in html somehow?

you saved like you can "save page as" now from the browser menu.

That part still works in modern browsers. What broke were the browser extension APIs for automatically saving to the file system without a dialog.

I took a lot and identify with a lot.

But I was wondering how much of this is the effect of the internet on cognition? Specifically in the "ADHD bingo", there are things like "having 50 tabs open" or "forgetting why I was looking at my phone". Isn't that just computers destroying our attention? Or do I have ADHD?