Hacker News Reader

Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

I don't see any effective difference between putting the data in a URL and putting the data in a local HTML file and opening the file in a browser. (And if you're going to put the data in a URL, you should probably be using a data: URL.)

View on HN

One difference is that when you visit/bookmark some normal webpage, you save on your computer only its title and address. With this, you are saving the page content as well, just by visiting the page.

With the data in a file you are also saving the page content (in a file). I don't see what difference it makes whether you're saving that content in a file or in a bookmark. (At the risk of stating the obvious, bookmarks are stored in a file.)

Its different because sharing a link is much easier than sharing a file

Not if the link and the file are the same size.

Take discord for example: you can only post a file of certain size, but you can post unlimited text

Discord messages aren't actually unlimited; they are limited to 2,000 characters, unless this restriction was recently removed. I have personally encountered this, mainly when using code blocks.

Even then. Try to send me a `Hello World` webpage both ways and guess which one will actually get clicked on and seen

Can you tinyurl a file?

Can you tinyurl a url with more than a few thousand characters?

Even if this were possible (which, even if tinyurl supported it, would break most browsers) you would be effectively hosting your content on tinyurl.com. Again, this is no different from hosting the file on any of a zillion public data hosting services.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com