Feature Request: frontmatter metadata associated with html files

[notuntoward]

Thanks for this plugin! It works perfectly with html files from the excellent SingleFile.

One thing I'm missing, though, is the ability to tag html files, and to associate with them other metadata that's normally in a markdown file's frontmatter. Besides tags, the URL the html came from is important.

Is there a way to add this frontmatter enabling to HTML Reader?

I suppose I could store all this in the frontmatter of a sibling markdown page that's linked to the html. But the redundancy will add clutter to the vault, and cause consistency problems sooner or later. It would also require a lot of steps. I, and many others, hope to recreate in Obsidian the simple, frictionless web page capture process found in programs like Evernote.

[nuthrash]

After some hours investigation, I think it is very hard to accomplish your feature request.

1. The frontmatter facility is Obsidian internal supporting, and it only works with Markdown(*.md) files.
2. The Obsidian's API does not provide any co-working API to allow frontmatter facility interacts with other file-types. You could refer to MarkdownPostProcessorContext/frontmatter or obsidian-api/obsidian.d.ts#processFrontMatter.
3. The Obsidian app itself only provides limited access privileges for plugins, and it is not an open-sourced project.

Therefore,

1. Almost all annotator plugins would create sibling markdown files to work with target files in order to make the frontmatter or tags work.
2. Even a plugin developer create a new frontmatter facility, there is no way to pass related data to the official frontmatter facility of Obsidian app. That means the official tag-pane would not show any content of the new frontmatter facility of non-Markdown files.

Alternatively,

1. You could use the official Obsidian Importer plugin to import HTML as Markdown files, then add frontmatter by hands.
2. I need more time to investigate and test many Obsidian APIs deeply to find if there is any way to satisfy your feature request. Maybe need a month, and I think it will be one of these conclusions:
   1. No way to interact with the official frontmatter facility, so mission failed.
   2. The Obsidian developer team provides some new APIs to allow plugin interact with the official frontmatter facility. I guess that is impossible, because it might violate plugin designing rules.
   3. I find some un-documented APIs can interact with the official frontmatter facility (including add/remove/sort etc.).

[notuntoward]

Thanks for all the thought you put into this!

About:

alternative 1: I've tried several html->markdown importers, including Obsidian Importer and have found that the result is pretty bad on pages with complex tables, images, or headings. They lose any highlights I've added as well. So, sometimes, the original html is the best thing.

alternative 2: Thanks for thinking about an even more detailed investigation! But I now realize there could be a shortcut alternative.

"alternative" 3 would it be possible to just embed the html in the sibling markdown page? Then there'd be only one file, and it could have frontmatter. But...

1. would this really work? For example, could you scroll through the embedded html, and search it normally?
2. would it still be possible to re-edit any highlights in the html with, for example, SingleFile?

[nuthrash]

1. would this really work? For example, could you scroll through the embedded html, and search it normally?

In fact, the Markdown format allow embed HTML codes, but there are many issues shall be resolved on the Obsidian platform, for example:

1. The Obsidian app has many access limitations for external javascript files, local image files, etc..
2. Some CSS effects might be disabled by the Obsidian app's internal Markdown code processor.
3. ...

In the view of this HTML reader plugin, it seems cannot handle merged Markdown files directly, because this plugin register its handling file types are ".html" or ".htm". Therefore, your suggestion might violate the plugin designing rules.

2. would it still be possible to re-edit any highlights in the html with, for example, SingleFile?

Obviously, the answer is no, because it is not a HTML file.

[nuthrash]

Hi @notuntoward,
I cannot find any approach to satisfy your feature request currently. But I would keep your feature request and investigate periodically if there is any new API can be used to accomplish it.