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I Stored a Website in a Favicon

timwehrle.de

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Re: I Stored a Website in a Favicon

#111

Post by econ »

I played with this once hoping the browser wouldn't care what the file was.

The plan came from an experiment from long ago where I put 1x1 images at the end on my pages, the images loaded from websites my page linked to. Preloading the assets made those pages load much faster. Sadly it also broke pages that served "hot linking images not allowed" text on images.

The new plan was to have a javascript or css file called favicon.ico so that the browser would load it at the same time the html was requested. Then one wouldn't have to wait for the html to be parsed for the second round trip to happen.

Sadly it didn't work.

Re: I Stored a Website in a Favicon

#112

Post by econ »

peter-m80 wrote: post #16
weetii wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, yeah, I wrote the article. This (of course) would be more practical. Thanks for pointing it out. I wanted the payload to "live" in actual pixel data rather than hidden text inside an XML file. That’s why I went this way :)

The ico file format allows multiple resolution icons, so a lot of data

You can use any image format. Try using an animated gif.

I don't know what this is but it's huge.

https://news.ycombinator.com/favicon.ico

Re: I Stored a Website in a Favicon

#113

Post by tetrisgm »

purple-leafy wrote: post #110
tetrisgm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw one before that was doing this and saved the whole thing as a base64 stream. So the url would dynamically update and have all its data. Pretty cool. I suppose the main obstacle is now where do I load the site from, and how much can be stored in itself or an image :)

That’s a pretty clever idea to treat it as a stream, why didn’t I think of that…

Lmk if you end up pushing this further!

Re: I Stored a Website in a Favicon

#115

Post by jcubic »

Does't work for me. It rendered some garbage:

:f3=Ygbukte!in"c"Hbviann:1h3> =n= " Exgtyvhkle znt%pfsdafipg thfivlmu "vas dcdpeed hrondbvjbno"rixfls, ;.q>

I use Helium on Linux with Polish locale.

Re: I Stored a Website in a Favicon

#116

Post by slash0x4 »

Tepix wrote: post #7

Instead of going via pixels, why not use a SVG favicon and directly store markup inside it and extract it? Use this favicon.svg: hello HN! use this in your to use a svg favicon: finally, use this in your to extract it and add it to your document body: fetch(favicon.href).then(r => r.text()).then(t => document.body.innerHTML += t.match(/ /)[0]);

  
    
    
hello HN!

Re: I Stored a Website in a Favicon

#117

Post by esquivalience »

stevenhuang wrote: post #100
esquivalience wrote: post #21

I found the agressively staccato, clearly LLM-generated content extremely difficult to read.

There should be a pathology for thinking things must be LLM generated when it's simply not always the case. People's ability to discern is completely fried.

Do you think I was wrong about this one? Maybe.

I'm usually fairly forgiving about it and like to err on the side of being generous to the individual but in this case it seemed very clear to me and got in the way of the message. I noticed the .de domain and wondered whether it might be AI translation, But I don't think it was, and in my experience, AI translation doesn't give the same uncanny valley vibes.

Re: I Stored a Website in a Favicon

#120

Post by probiz »

bstsb wrote: post #33
esquivalience wrote: post #21

I found the agressively staccato, clearly LLM-generated content extremely difficult to read.

for the first time in a while on HN, i disagree with the characterisation as AI-generated. at most it was drafted with an LLM, but the final output is pretty human to me. they used the wrong it’s/its, made But. its own one-word sentence, didn’t capitalise HTML, and used “okayy” in parenthesis. all of this isn’t to criticise the writer - i enjoyed it more seeing these little imperfections that make up a blog post

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