shortly

Yeah, the pages linked from those HN links don't seem to exist, but you can still download it: https://github.com/lucaspiller/shortly I was always quite fascinated by the concept, but I suspect liability and lack of control over the content is a fatal issue and why nothing much seemed to come from it. If someone makes a 'bad' page, which is inevitable, the domain with the hashify/shortly code would be held responsible and the only way the site owner could 'remove' the content would be to stop the service.

How do we refer to the type of architecture without server-side component proper[0][1][2] though? Makes it surprisingly hard to find material and research on those topics. Recently I was looking for one insightful talk (with a PoC) where websites run completely on users’ machines. It’s been a couple of years since I saw that talk for the first time, “cloud” was the term of choice to refer to what’s “serverless” now. I had to give up after pages upon pages of search results talking about Lambda or Azure (otherwise I’d have linked the talk here, of course). [0] https://github.com/jhiesey/peercloud [1] https://github.com/lucaspiller/shortly [2] https://paul.kinlan.me/serverless-sync-in-web-apps/

I’m sure it would be possible. You’d have to embed the CSS and JavaScript in https://github.com/lucaspiller/shortly into an HTML page, then represent that page as a data: URI. You could leave out the text-compression code and include only the decompression code, because the page only needs to decompress its embedded message. You would minify the code so there is less of it to store in the URL. You might even be able to shorten the URL by having the page bootstrap itself – DEFLATE all code except the code for INFLATEing, then INFLATE on the rest of the code for displaying the text, then run that code to INFLATE the text itself and display it. Alternatively, you could just give someone a Shortly link and write a note next to it saying “If that link doesn’t work, just run that URL’s hash fragment through Base64-decode followed by INFLATE”, r

Well yes, and no. All paste data is stored in the URL, and the algorithm for encoding/decoding is known[1]. Github-hosted tool provides only the default implementation. You're right, data: would be more pure, but AFAIR it has some limitations. [1] - https://github.com/lucaspiller/shortly