A Zero-Dependency Approach to Archival, Interactive Research

My name is Tim Jones. I am a field botanist who always winds up as the IT guy. After rescuing too many servers and rotting projects, I wanted to build something archivally bulletproof. I welcome you to do the math on this.

I’ve spent my life documenting species that need to outlive me, sometimes with a twelve-foot alligator two feet off my nose. In botany, we value the specimen: a physical, verifiable record designed to survive centuries.

When I turned to data architecture, I found modern web tooling to be the opposite. Most systems are brittle stacks that fail when a single dependency shifts. I wanted to build what I call a Digital Paratype. In taxonomy, a paratype is a supplementary specimen supporting the primary record. This is a research paper that functions as a permanent, interactive instrument without external dependencies.

The Stack: Vanilla JS (ECMAScript) and CSS3. No frameworks, no NPM, no CDNs, no build steps. The Weight: ~40 KB for the technical methodology; ~325 KB for the live analysis. The Performance: 100/100/100/100 PageSpeed scores—standard-compliant logic.

The Features:

Instant State Toggling: Millisecond latency for complex data views.

Deep-Linkable State URLs: Share a specific analytical view without reloads.

Self-Auditing: The document resolves itself for durations, text, and metadata at load time to stay evergreen.

The Archive: A seven-year longitudinal Michigan Cannabis market study, manually transcribed for fidelity.

The Millennium Math: The limitations section surfaced a constraint that materially shaped the design: The 5MB Ceiling. By maintaining a linear growth rate of 5.3 KB per year and at the current data payload of 34 KB for seven years- I encourage anyone to do the math on this.

How to test:

Technical Methodology: https://tjid3.org/tech.html

The Artifact: https://tjid3.org/

I’m looking for feedback on UI responsiveness and whether a zero-dependency, monolithic approach like this is the only viable path forward for archival academic publishing.

Best,

Tim Jones