[pdyc]

i also used fragment technique for sharing html snippets but url's became very long, i had to implement optional url shortener after users complained. Unfortunately that meant server interaction.

https://easyanalytica.com/tools/html-playground/

[FailMore]

(I left a stand alone comment, but:) A little update: I added privacy-focused optional shorter URLs to SDocs.

You can read more about the implementation here: https://sdocs.dev/#sec=short-links

Briefly:

  https://sdocs.dev/s/{short id}#k={encryption key}
                      └────┬───┘   └───────┬──────┘
                           │                │
                      sent to           never leaves
                       server           your browser

We encrypt your document client side. The encrypted document is sent to the server with an id to save it against. The encryption key stays client side in the URL fragment. (And - probably very obviously - the encryption key is required to make the sever stored text readable again).

You can test this by opening your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, click Generate next to the "Short URL" heading, and inspecting the request body. You will see a base64-encoded blob of random bytes, not your document.

[FailMore]

Really nice implementation by the way.

Re URL length: Yes... I have a feeling it could become an issue. I was wondering if a browser extension might give users the ability to have shorter urls without losing privacy... but haven't looked into it deeply/don't know if it would be possible (browser extensions are decent bridges between the local machine and the browser, so maybe some sort of decryption key could be used to allow for more compressed urls...)

[pdyc]

i doubt it would be possible, it boils down to compression problem compressing x amount of content to y bits, since content is unpredictable it cannot be done without having intermediary to store it.

[mystickphoenix]

For this use-case, maybe compression and then encoding would get more data into the URL before you hit a limit (or before users complain)?

I.e. .md -> gzip -> base64