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Using cloud storage & collaboration services with HTML, CSS, JS etc

Firstly, I'm not sure if this is best here or in Super User, or both - so apologies.

The objective of my project is to develop interactive documents using core web technologies: HTML, CSS and Javascript. These documents are not necessarily destined for the public web - they may need to be private (e.g. on a corporate intranet) with controlled access. These are designed to be more "standalone" documents (like an MS Word doc) which happen to be written in HTML, rather than typical public webpages.

The question I am grappling with is whether and how common cloud storage / collaboration / document management services (Dropbox, Sharepoint / OneDrive, Google Drive etc.) can and should be used to store these HTML files, particularly so that access control and sharing / collaboration features can be applied.

More info:

Ideally, I want to understand to what extent each service can be used to:

  • Store the HTML, CSS and JS files (they can all do this as you'd expect)
  • Browse and navigate the HTML pages in a browser as if they were any other website
  • Provide access control (i.e. using their "sharing" features)
  • Provide other document management features (versioning, commenting etc.)
  • Basic editing (without downloading, editing and re-uploading)

What I've found so far (not being an expert in any of these services):

  1. Dropbox

    • The Dropbox client on my Mac opens and renders the HTML in a browser as expected!
    • But on the web, Dropbox displays a preview of the un-styled HTML in an iFrame
    • It will render the HTML directly if it has a "share link" by manually editing the url to dl.dropboxusercontent.com/docid/file.html
    • ... but it will not find the external files (JS, CSS, images, etc.) unless they have absolute URLs.

  2. MS OneDrive / SharePoint

  3. Google Drive

    • People with access rights to the HTML can render it in a browser via a URL like www.googledrive.com/host/docid
    • This "hosting" service is being deprecated from 2016. Link

So, to summarise, my question:

  • Are there any cloud services that can be used with "standalone" HTML+CSS+JS documents just as they can with other documents (.docx, .pptx, etc.), and give a good user experience?

At the moment, my research suggests not - the user experience is too clunky, and so I may need to host the HTML documents on web servers somewhere, and implement my own access control & doc management solution.

If anyone has any other suggestions / solutions for implementing access control / doc management for HTML pages, please let me know.

Solution

  • Short answer: No, you cannot use normal file-storage solutions for this. Google has one but they're deprecating it due to Google App Engine and other services, and Sharepoint usually requires a Server Farm.

    It's possible there is a specific service that works this way, but generally most companies treat web hosting and document hosting as separate things, usually because web hosting is more taxing on a server.

    Solutions

    If you're on a corporate intranet, hosting the files off a basic apache or Windows web server should be fine, assuming you are okay with everyone on the intranet being able to access them.

    If you'd like more fine-grained permissions, I would recommend building a very simple web application, or using an existing CMS that has basic rights management built in, to serve content. This also means that, if the CMS was secure enough, it could be public facing, if you wanted, so these files could be accessed (with the right creds) from a non-intranet location.

    Also, keep in mind that, if you're mostly using the HTML so you can have links (and nothing more complex), you can export websites as PDFs, either using a PDF printer, or a more specific tool.