I was thinking that exposing files at exact commits would be simpler, but then I realized that to get the exact commit you would need an API that returns all references and HEAD (separate from the repository state event) and then I realized that to build a GitHub-like way to browse files on gitworkshop you'll also need all these things, plus a history of commits, metadata about all commits and so on, right? Which brings me back to: why not do a full repository clone on the browser and get all that data at once? Is it just the big size of things?