I agree.

My tool flatterer: https://lite.flatterer.dev/ converts deeply nested JSON to csv/xlsx, is done in web assembly in the browser.

It hard to prove that it is not sending data to a server, so it can be trusted. I know people could check dev tools but that is error prone and some users may not be able to do it.

I wish there was an easy way to prove this to users as it would make online tools like this much more attractive.

I think there is an easy way to prove this to users. Make your thing be a single page self contained html file which they save into the hard disk. Then they can trust the restricted permissions with which chrome runs such local files.

If you have a tech savvy audience they can also view your thing in an iframe with only sandbox="allow-scripts" to prove that it's not making network requests.

I wrote an html/js log viewer with those security models https://GitHub.com/ljw1004/seaoflogs - it handles up to 10kline log files decently, all locally.

Would be nice to have the option to switch tabs into offline mode, just like we can mute them.

You can do that with Chrome dev tools: Network -> No throttling -> Offline

Don't know how reliable this is though or whether a web developer could work around this.

It could be storing data and send it later when you visit the same origin from a different tab.

Unless you were also using incognito or throwaway tab containers to discard stored data.

Good point, thanks.

Turn off wifi? Unplug the ethernet cable? Try it from my garden shed where there never seems to be connectivity no matter what I try.

I have been working on this Rust based JSON flattener (https://github.com/kindly/flatterer) to XLSX/CSV/SQLITE/PARQUET/POSTGRES for about 2 years. I finally made a WASM based one for CSV/XLSX which is really easy to play with. You can use it via a url (if the data has CORS headers), for example https://lite.flatterer.dev?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdummyjson.com%2....

The main difference with other converters/flatteners is that for one-to-many relationships (lists of objects in JSON) it produces a multi table output with keys to help join the tables together. Essentially produces a relational schema, along with some type information, of the JSON provided. For simple non-nested JSON it works too, but is a bit overkill.

Its all opensource and free, and I think that it will become more and more useful as JSON/Graphql APIs proliferate.

Try this: https://flatterer.opendata.coop/

There is no binary yet but there is a python CLI and library, even though it is written in rust.

It is the only tool that I know that deals with nested JSON and converts it into relational tables.

Here is a notebook of the python library usage.

https://deepnote.com/@david-raznick/Flatterer-Demo-FWeGccp_Q...