The comment in the first link about Yahoo embedding a giant b64-encoded JSON object in the URL reminds me of something horrible I did in a previous job.
To get around paying our website vendor (think locked-down hosted CMS) for an overpriced event calendar module, I coded a public page that would build a calendar using a base64-encoded basic JSON "events" schema embedded in a "data-events" attribute. Staff would use a non-public page that would pull the existing events data from the public page to prepopulate the calendar builder, which they could then use to edit the calendar and spit out a new code snippet to put on the public page. And so on.
It basically worked! But I think they eventually did just fork over the money for the calendar add-on.
Mostly just the DIV with a giant string of base64-encoded JSON in a data attribute that looked pretty ugly. Website visitors were of course basically none the wiser if it all worked.
To get around paying our website vendor (think locked-down hosted CMS) for an overpriced event calendar module, I coded a public page that would build a calendar using a base64-encoded basic JSON "events" schema embedded in a "data-events" attribute. Staff would use a non-public page that would pull the existing events data from the public page to prepopulate the calendar builder, which they could then use to edit the calendar and spit out a new code snippet to put on the public page. And so on.
It basically worked! But I think they eventually did just fork over the money for the calendar add-on.