Building a web application that can work with local files
I think mht is exactly what you want. mht is a file extension recongnized by IE. Internally it is an HTML file. IE (only) treats a mht file with the same security restrictions that a exe might have. You could access the file system, delete a file, display a file etc.. It is everything that html/javascript security was trying to prevent.  Now that IE has changed significantly I don't know what the support for this is nowadays. I couldn't find a reference page to give you a link, but it is simple enough - just save a html file with an mht extension
I'd like to build an application (local, not online) by using front-end web technology for the UI, the application simply displays PDFs and has a few text fields for the user to fill in with regards to the current PDF they're viewing, the user can then export their notes and a file path to the document in CSV file format.
comment about file, some more notes, C:\somefolder\doc1.pdf
comment about file, some more notes, C:\somefolder\doc2.pdf
My first issue, JavaScript can't access the local file system, so I used a file upload form which worked except the filepaths were shown as blob filepaths and not the actual system file path. Other than that my "application" worked as intended.
I went and learned Flask in hopes of using python for the back end, which works great except when I pass in the file path to the pdf C:\SomeFolder\doc1.pdf inside the 'src' attribute for an  Chrome says it can't access local files. SO I'm back to sqaure one!
How can I go about building this application with local file access?