this is not something I came up with, Simon wrote it and I liked the differentiation between "vibe coding" where there is less effort
for this case project I think I would actually go back and say it's vibe coded, but I didn't want to just call it vibe coding because I did spend time going back and forth and directing the agent
For software, but that's a well trodden path at this point. I've seen a few projects that are actually "vibe engineering" outside of software on the 3d modeling side so the terms are confusing.
thanks for the info, I'll see if I can get a agent to fix it
it's a static webpage, the source is available with right-click view source, I added a BSD2 licence header to it to make clear it's fine to take and do mostly whatever with
yeah, isn't it impressive how fast modern computers can be if you make a bit of effort, in this case I think I told it to just use plain javascript and make sure it's fast :-)
And if you are open to bug reports.. if I move around the drawings move smoothly with the map, but if I zoom in/out the drawings move only after the map zooming animation ends, rather than smoothly
it's a static webpage, the source is available with right-click view source, I added a BSD2 licence header to it to make clear it's fine to take and do mostly whatever with
Per the spec [0], a URL can hold at least 8,000 characters.
> It is RECOMMENDED that all senders and recipients support, at a minimum, URIs with lengths of 8000 octets in protocol elements. Note that this implies some structures and on-wire representations (for example, the request line in HTTP/1.1) will necessarily be larger in some cases.
Mainstream browsers support at least 64,000 characters [1], and Chrome supports up to 2MB [2].
This unfortunately immediately crashed my android firefox nightly browser. Amusingly it loaded the page, but one click on the address bar sent me straight to the home screen
I guess the surveillance industry has enough incentives to make this ever larger, so they can fit more utm-trackers, campaign-ids, referal trackers and whatnot in URLs.
It's truly insane how large typical share-URLS for content on instagram, youtube or any other large platforms are. URLs that could've been example.com/t/some-large-enough-id?time=13337 are stuffed with hundreds of characters, just to gather more data on people using these links.
> Per the spec [0], a URL can hold at least 8,000 characters.
> It is RECOMMENDED that all senders and recipients support, at a minimum, URIs with lengths of 8000 octets in protocol elements.
It is always worth remembering that, unless you have already ensured that the content has been rendered into a URI-safe subset of ASCII, a character and an octet are not the same thing.
Was just working on something similar this morning. As an fyi you can avoid the string replacing in the base64 string by using `.toBase64({ alphabet: "base64url" })` and `fromBase64({ alphabet: "base64url"})`.
Students are lazy, in a good way, so they are more likely to run things on their own and play with interactive bits if the whole lecture is just one link.
I love this. Great little html page to refresh on Javascript.
For fun I put it in chatgpt and asked if there are bugs.
It warned about fromBase64() and toBase64() not existing in main browsers. It is supported but is indeed a new "baseline 2025"feature. It suggested more compatible code using two small functions to convert characters manually.
"deflate-raw is not consistently supported." It suggested using 'deflate' instead.
I recently build a small framework to create JavaScript apps that use this kind of URL sharing and therefore don’t require a backend: https://github.com/grothkopp/lost.js
I really like this from a privacy point of view. So much so that I'm thinking about adding a purely URL-storage solution as an option in my https://kraa.io editor.
From purely privacy point of view it’s not. But if you also want markdown features, custom typography and easy sharing, this starts to make more sense.
Think you've inadvertently found a way to provide extra tests for mobile devices.
The Crime and Punishment one consistently crashes Brave mobile for me. I assume it's the length of the URL - and seen another commentator say the same for chrome mobile (sure they both use the same codebase so likely an upstream issue).
I made something similar once, specifically targetted for guitar tablature https://tabviewer.app/
To make links shorter for sharing with others, I use a shortlink service. Pasting URLs of thousands of characters long can be problematic
Not really… using js to change the CSS on the go is not a good practice. Why does it matter? Because of the “dark mode” browser extensions. They often use the presence of @media query (or other standard CSS means of setting dark mode colors), and if it’s the JS that changes the colors we often get partial Dark Mode, which does not work at all.
A few weeks ago I vibe coded a guitar tab editor just because I wanted to share a quick tab in a chat group with my band. When the first prototype already worked great, I just couldn’t stop to add features so that it now even has mouseover chord diagrams and copy and paste.
The sharing works just like here, by encoding the tab itself in the url.
I wonder if this can be paired with a local URL shortener? Chaining this with a local URL shortener can mean access to any doc with a single letter (or very letters).
Thanks for sharing! I tried a similar content-in-url approach for a family grocery list app but I couldn't get the url that short. (It worked but it was a bit cumbersome sharing over Whatsapp.) Will see what I can learn from this!
I created a similar app just 2 days ago targeting Whatsapp (https://linqshare.com) . Context: In my locality, EA, we normally have Whatsapp groups raising funds for whatever reason; for every content edit, the admin has to copy-edit-paste updated content(which contains name and amount) to the group. This small app intends to provide a table that's easy to convey this info. App stores content in the url but a preview image (needed for Whatsapp share) is stored at R2. Let me know if you want the source code running at Cloudflare.
In Firefox, https://textarea.my shows up as as a completely static non-actionable white page. Just white, with default cursor. No errors on the console.
I think a couple of days ago I stumbled upon your editor in corp Google intranets when I was looking for internal tool to pretty print some json, small world :)
love it, funny enough, I had similar idea pop into my head some weeks ago, just to be able to store quick notes and favorite them in my browser for later
I like these kinds of projects, but adding a file export/import is inevitable. It's less about the limits of a URL and more about practicality.
I also have no way to confirm that URLs aren't logged server side, so I'd never trust the claim about "no tracking". That's why these projects also end up self-hosted.
Typos and URL mangles are common though, and I'd still have no way to confirm if it got logged in that case. It's out of scope for anything in the github source, and instead depends on the server hosting the page. I know this isn't meant to be super secure, but it's still worth a mention.
Typos aren't making the hash part turn into something else. Like your parent comment explained to you, the hash part is not sent to the server. If you go out of your way to mangle the URL then of course a mangled URL without hash will likely get logged to the server. But I'm not sure how one would manage to go so much out of the way that they mangle the URL in a way that removes the hash.
You don't have a choice pasting links into some apps. They may strip out query and hash components, percent encode, force URL shortener services, etc.
Percent encoding is particularly bad since it may also bloat the length causing truncation and the decompress to fail. There's endless footguns with URLs.
I needed a way to share a link to a map, with drawings and the ability for the receiver to see their own location on the map.
Annotated screenshots solves the first but not the second.
Vibe engineered this, with many of the same ideas as OP.
Took an evening. Just in time apps for one specific use case is a thing.
And because it's so cheap to make and can be hosted cheaply with no backend, it can be given away for free.
https://nyman.re/mapdraw/#l=60.172108%2C24.941458&z=16&d=LU8...
While I'm all for vibe coding as appropriate, there's a lot of humor to be found it calling it engineering. :D
for this case project I think I would actually go back and say it's vibe coded, but I didn't want to just call it vibe coding because I did spend time going back and forth and directing the agent
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/
Could we also add text annotations? Also the delete button could delete just the last shape or a selected shape so as not to start over?
Is the code open source online somewhere?
it's a static webpage, the source is available with right-click view source, I added a BSD2 licence header to it to make clear it's fine to take and do mostly whatever with
And if you are open to bug reports.. if I move around the drawings move smoothly with the map, but if I zoom in/out the drawings move only after the map zooming animation ends, rather than smoothly
Firefox seems to work.
> It is RECOMMENDED that all senders and recipients support, at a minimum, URIs with lengths of 8000 octets in protocol elements. Note that this implies some structures and on-wire representations (for example, the request line in HTTP/1.1) will necessarily be larger in some cases.
Mainstream browsers support at least 64,000 characters [1], and Chrome supports up to 2MB [2].
[0]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110#section-4.1-5
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/417184/
[2]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/s...
Here is the Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky:
- https://medv.io/goto/crime-and-punishment-by-fyodor-dostoevs...
https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/...
My absolute favorite thing about modernity is how enabled we are to riff on a riff of a riff.
In 1346, if a blacksmith came up with something cool, its quite possible that it died with them.
EDIT: actually I can edit the URL, but it takes a while to load.
It's truly insane how large typical share-URLS for content on instagram, youtube or any other large platforms are. URLs that could've been example.com/t/some-large-enough-id?time=13337 are stuffed with hundreds of characters, just to gather more data on people using these links.
> It is RECOMMENDED that all senders and recipients support, at a minimum, URIs with lengths of 8000 octets in protocol elements.
It is always worth remembering that, unless you have already ensured that the content has been rendered into a URI-safe subset of ASCII, a character and an octet are not the same thing.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
Students are lazy, in a good way, so they are more likely to run things on their own and play with interactive bits if the whole lecture is just one link.
https://gabrielsroka.github.io/webpages/calc.htm#a1:=Rate=3....
More examples https://gabrielsroka.github.io/webpages/It's about 130 js loc
For fun I put it in chatgpt and asked if there are bugs.
It warned about fromBase64() and toBase64() not existing in main browsers. It is supported but is indeed a new "baseline 2025"feature. It suggested more compatible code using two small functions to convert characters manually.
"deflate-raw is not consistently supported." It suggested using 'deflate' instead.
https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://raw.githubusercontent...
The Crime and Punishment one consistently crashes Brave mobile for me. I assume it's the length of the URL - and seen another commentator say the same for chrome mobile (sure they both use the same codebase so likely an upstream issue).
https://github.com/planbnet/guitartabs
I don't think urls were built for that kind of punishment.
https://gist.github.com/smcllns/8b727361ce4cf55cbc017faaefbb...
but when I hit the keyboard I can see my it's is already loaded
Good job!
If you click save you get the option to use a URL.
The problem with a URL every edit is a new URL. So you send the URL to a friend, then fix a typo, they need a new URL.
The other problem is of course the space limit.
- https://textarea.my/#TYuxDcIwEEWpmeKUCiSIJQoKU0KFRBUWOGwnWDi...
I built Ponder in the same vein. It, however, has 10 files. I did not use the URL, did not have double the fun, and now I’m sad.
https://github.com/codazoda/ponder
Not really… using js to change the CSS on the go is not a good practice. Why does it matter? Because of the “dark mode” browser extensions. They often use the presence of @media query (or other standard CSS means of setting dark mode colors), and if it’s the JS that changes the colors we often get partial Dark Mode, which does not work at all.
https://gourav.io/devtools/notepad
The sharing works just like here, by encoding the tab itself in the url.
https://github.com/planbnet/guitartabs
hopefully mine can stand out with all the extra features i have managed to cram in
data:text/html, <html contenteditable>
Now if you bootstrap the app code into the url too then you can have a minimal kernel to run any machine in url.
Then you can also make a Quine somehow.
https://textarea.my/#7cGBAAAAAMMgzfmTHORVAQAAAAAAAADAuwE=
[1]: https://davidlowryduda.com/mathshare/
--edit-- test link: https://linqshare.com/#eJxtkM9KxDAQxl-lzLmHrv8Ova3IHlz04BY8F...
https://sqlscope.netlify.app/
Safari 15.6.1: Unhandled Promise Rejection: ReferenceError: Can't find variable: CompressionStream
Half a megabyte for a URL. That certainly is a thing.
I also have no way to confirm that URLs aren't logged server side, so I'd never trust the claim about "no tracking". That's why these projects also end up self-hosted.
Percent encoding is particularly bad since it may also bloat the length causing truncation and the decompress to fail. There's endless footguns with URLs.