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Comment by jstrieb | Hacker News Reader

I spent some time looking at similar specs for more recent browsers, but wasn't able to find anything useful. This was for a proof-of-concept I made that stores entire web pages in URLs (creatively named "URL Pages") by base64-encoding them and putting them in the URL fragment (the part after the "#").

https://github.com/jstrieb/urlpages

The URLs this thing generates get pretty damn big sometimes, since I never got around to implementing compression. I can confirm that massive URLs from pages with inline images do work, but probably take some not-so-optimized code paths because they make my computer's fans spin up. Click at your own peril:

https://git.io/Jss7V

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I made a service to store arbitrary files as URLs that is similar. The hard part is files that are too large, I can handle files up to 5mb if you click on them all via local storage. Compression helps a lot as making them base64 increases the size quite a bit.

https://podje.li

Could you make whole webpages just through urls? Such as they will completely portable? Portable being taken with a grain of sand ofc.

not the entire content, but a hash id is pretty common https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme

Yes, I did this for self-contained reports in maybe 2014. All images referenced (containing diagrams) were embedded as data URIs. Restrictions are AFAIK more picky now, though so YMMV in 2021.

Cool project! It is kind of interesting that the link is the content, not sure it’s always useful, but for twitter like short form content perhaps?

Well webpages themselves including links, the embedding would need to be recursive.

I needed to send data over GET in 2012/2013 and built my own tiny LZW-alike compression to squeeze as much as possible into the 100kb which seemed to be the safe limit for non-ie browsers at the time

Here's the repo https://github.com/naugtur/ripper/

That's really interesting, I'd wondered if that was feasible! A few years ago I needed to send myself notes and URLs from a work computer to look at later, so I put it into the browser as https://< my website >.com/index.html?saveforlater=note%20to%20myself

When I got home I'd search the server logs for "saveforlater" and retrieve my note. Though it might have been faster to just write it on a slip of paper.

I did that too, but the limit in my language was around 1024 characters in URL's so had to make small packets to send data.

Okay, but you can already store web pages in URLs. `data:text/html,<h1>Hi%20there!</h1>`

You can even base64 encode them, if you want to.

This is true, but linking to data URIs no longer works. Many browsers block them for "security reasons." In Firefox, a link to that page is not clickable for me:

https://git.io/JssFK

From a convenience standpoint, it's also far less likely that a URL with an http: scheme will be blocked by a random web application than one with a data: scheme. For example it makes sharing on social media sites and chat applications more feasible.

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