This is an ancient idea. I read a 2600 article back in the early 2000s or possibly late 1990s that did essentially this same thing using a bash script and one of the first URL shortening services available at the time.
Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?
51–60 of 84 posts
Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?
#52I looked at URL shortener limits some time ago and found these approximate limits by trial-and-error:
* TinyURL 65,536 characters and probably more, but requests timed out; there isn’t an explicit limit apparently
* Bit.ly 2000 characters.
* Is.Gd 2000 characters.
* Twurl.nl 255 characters.
This was 2.5 years ago, not sure how much of these have changed (other than bit.ly, which the linked article confirms is 2048, probably the same as when I tested it).
Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real trouble is that when you link to a hashified URL, you are actually embedding in your web page (an encoding of) the content of the page you are linking to. Think matryoshka.
Not to mention that makes link cycles impossible.
Nah! I am pretty sure that a quine can be made using this! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)
Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?
#54Well, for one thing, you can't tweet a link.
Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?
#55ought to gzip the string before it goes to base64 while you're at it
Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?
#56I've sometimes wondered about a system where the URL of a document is an actual hash, like SHA-1, of the document. That'd chance the semantics of hyperlinks from "link to document at this internet address" to "link to document with these contents", just like Hashify does, but it could do arbitrarily large documents. The tricky part with that system would be that you'd also need some new mechanism to retrieve the file…
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme
In a single link for a file, it can contain multiple hashes for multiple means of retrieval.
Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?
#57Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?
#58ought to gzip the string before it goes to base64 while you're at it
We actually do this exact thing to send dynamic parameters to a chart-generating backend server. It works great; you get a surprising amount of compression using gzip (2-4x space savings) and the URLs are naturally cached by proxies without any magic!
Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?
#59I looked at URL shortener limits some time ago and found these approximate limits by trial-and-error: * TinyURL 65,536 characters and probably more, but requests timed out; there isn’t an explicit limit apparently * Bit.ly 2000 characters. * Is.Gd 2000 characters. * Twurl.nl 255 characters. This was 2.5 years ago, not sure how much of these have changed (other than bit.ly, which the linked article confirms is 2048, p…
2000 is roughly the maximum length of a URL that IE can handle, incidentally.
Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?
#60Older Hacker News Post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2464213