How to store your app's entire state in the url • Hacker News Board

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#241

Post by cryptonector » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 11:10 PM UTC

AndrewStephens wrote: post #16

This is pretty common and has a bunch of advantages, like the fact you can link to and bookmark a particular state. Also, if you are careful you get undo and redo for free with the browser's back button doing all the work for you. The disadvantages are that your representation of internal state becomes part of the interface - if you ever change your app you need to deal with versioning the state so your new version c…

If the state cookie is generated by the server, then the best thing to do is to encrypt all application state cookies, and include an expiration time in them.

Also, consider whether you want to allow the user to share the URI or not. If not, then you need to always check that the user is authenticated as whatever you wrote in the state cookie.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#242

Post by jwilliams » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 11:11 PM UTC

Not necessarily mandatory - but I'd also recommend a stable sort on the keys prior to `stringify`.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#243

Post by moralestapia » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 11:16 PM UTC

AndrewStephens wrote: post #16

This is pretty common and has a bunch of advantages, like the fact you can link to and bookmark a particular state. Also, if you are careful you get undo and redo for free with the browser's back button doing all the work for you. The disadvantages are that your representation of internal state becomes part of the interface - if you ever change your app you need to deal with versioning the state so your new version c…

>Also, if you are careful you get undo and redo for free with the browser's back button doing all the work for you.

Ugh! Please don't do this!

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#244

Post by anigbrowl » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 11:16 PM UTC

It's clever, but I hate it: it makes computing weird and inaccessible to non-technical people, and makes citations etc. needlessly difficult to manage.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#245

Post by vesinisa » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 11:17 PM UTC

This is all fun and games until the junior dev edits the code to store the user's search history in that obfuscated appState object. The users end up sharing their URLs in public and unknowingly leaking some very private data.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#246

Post by actinium226 » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 11:17 PM UTC

This is really cool, both the state-in-url and the app itself.

Just wondering, how long did it take you to put the app together?

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#247

Post by StevenNunez » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 11:20 PM UTC

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #233

BurningFrog wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The possible advantage of the encoding is that it that it can be encrypted and make parameter hacking impossible.

Yeah, why not just base64 encode, shove that into a db with a shorter key? I'm pretty positive this is how tiktok works for sharing videos.

Probably don't want to pay for space for unauthed users.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#248

Post by nullsense » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 11:22 PM UTC

anotheraccount9 wrote: post #130

xwdv wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A horse walks into a bar. Several of the patrons quickly get up and leave, realizing the potential danger in the situation.

This has to be my favorite version I've ever heard.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#249

Post by OJFord » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 11:25 PM UTC

hunter2_ wrote: post #155

PUSH_AX wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious to hear why you are so shocked. Long, ugly, user unfriendly urls are really prevalent. Arguments can be made even query params are pretty ugly.. Are urls expected to be a good UX these days? What's the big deal?

I don't think people care so much about a messy address bar as a messy chat/email message after pasting a URL. Shorteners and vanity URLs exist, but that's more friction than just copying from the address bar as-is. This can be overcome with html, markdown, and other rich text formats that let you specify the visible link text (missing from many chat apps*), but that's also friction to compose compared to automatical…

> I don't think people care so much about a messy address bar as a messy chat/email message after pasting a URL.

But it's painful how few care about that!

I always clean them up before I send them (just manually - typically meaning all query parameters, e.g. with Amazon the text description after the actual ID) rarely even feel the need to check they still work, it's pretty easy, but maybe I shouldn't bother because it's only me that cares; they don't seem to notice that their links occupy half the screen and my don't!

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#250

Post by didericis » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 11:28 PM UTC

Ndymium wrote: post #163

Last November I had covid and during that time I wrote a little pastebin that runs in the browser, compresses the paste data with Brotli, and puts it in the URL. It has line numbers, file naming, and syntax highlighting so it's feature complete for my own use. Here's a demo, but beware, the URLs are loooong: https://nicd.gitlab.io/t/#NhfW?Qm3F?6-&22c&CQZXuP+Aej5OXzXk7... I find it interesting to sometimes play around…

Compression is one of the closest things to real life magic I’m aware of. Especially now that people have basically compressed the entire internet into a couple gig AI models.

And then when I think about biology/genetics and what kind of unfathomably weird and convoluted compression is going on there, and then think about whatever it is our brain is doing… and then when I think about how like all of our perception is probably some kind of weird inescapable compressed representation of true reality…

It’s all magic. Real life magic.