I wanted to see how far I could go building a notes app using only what modern browsers already provide – no frameworks, no storage APIs, no build step.What it does:
Single HTML file, no deps, 111 loc
Notes live in the URL hash (shareable links!)
Auto-compressed with CompressionStream
Plain-text editor (contenteditable)
History support
Page title from first # heading
Respects light/dark mode
No storage, cookies, or tracking
The entire app is the page source.
https://textarea.my/
▲Funny how I made almost exactly the same but for maps.
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...
Great tool! There is a little issue with the +/- zoom buttons not working something cause it is over layed by other div blocks. On mac firefox.
Is the code open source online somewhere?
> Vibe engineered
While I'm all for vibe coding as appropriate, there's a lot of humor to be found it calling it engineering. :D
block_dagger10 hours ago
[-] Fair. Though it seems that half of engineering is just giving a respectable name to whatever actually works.
reply▲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.
reply▲That is absolutely great!
Using it now to plan a trip.
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?
This is so cool!! The responsiveness of the page is so much better than any maps app I have used.
reply▲nextaccountic5 hours ago
[-] This is pretty cool!
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
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
reply▲spicyusername7 hours ago
[-] Incredible.
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.
gchamonlive10 hours ago
[-] Interesting, in Firefox mobile (actually fennec) if I tap the address bar, I get an empty text box.
EDIT: actually I can edit the URL, but it takes a while to load.
hmmm makes me wonder if you could train llms on gzipped text. would save a lot of tokens that way.
reply▲Works fine on Win11 Edge
reply▲LOL Tapping the address bar crashed my Chrome on mobile.
reply▲lurking_swe11 hours ago
[-] loaded OK for me on mobile safari.
reply▲Loaded fine for me too -- but like parent, tapping the address bar to share afterwards crashed it on Android here :)
reply▲My Firefox on mobile seemingly handled it fine.
reply▲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.
reply▲Very good point indeed. In the worst case scenario, you would only have 1/5th of that capacity
reply▲You claim no tracking, and yet there's a Cloudflare Web Analytics beacon placed at the bottom of the page (thankfully filtered out by uBlock Origin)
reply▲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 a privacy point of view, you might not want to use textarea.my since it includes some tracking bits at the end:
<script defer src="https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js/vcd15cbe7772f49c399c6a5babf22c1241717689176015" integrity="sha512-ZpsOmlRQV6y907TI0dKBHq9Md29nnaEIPlkf84rnaERnq6zvWvPUqr2ft8M1aS28oN72PdrCzSjY4U6VaAw1EQ==" data-cf-beacon='{"version":"2024.11.0","token":"6a22b097a2b44fa4af0a95817ce96ab5","r":1,"server_timing":{"name":{"cfCacheStatus":true,"cfEdge":true,"cfExtPri":true,"cfL4":true,"cfOrigin":true,"cfSpeedBrain":true},"location_startswith":null}}' crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
From a privacy point of view how is it any better than just using a local, native text editor?
reply▲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.
reply▲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
Voice typing is a cool feature, have you considered whisper wasm instead of OpenAI api?
reply▲meander_water4 hours ago
[-] Cool project, but loading "Crime and Punishment" crashed my mobile browser.
I don't think urls were built for that kind of punishment.
greggman6510 hours ago
[-] I have something tangentially similar here:
https://jsgist.orgIf 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.
billforsternz12 hours ago
[-] This is very interesting, very refreshing, very simple and clever, very well done, very everything good. Bravo and thank you.
reply▲Why store in the URL and make it bloated? Isn't storing in local storage enough?
reply▲I like this because most of the time I need random stuff—numbers, quick searches, or ideas—and this helps instantly.
reply▲> Respects light/dark mode
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.
No js is used for colors.
reply▲I keep this in the bookmark bar for the times I need a place to paste a quick bit of text (but it doesn't persist):
data:text/html, <html contenteditable>
Use xem's version [1] if you need persistence:
<body id=b contentEditable onload=b[i="innerHTML"]=[(l=localStorage).c] oninput=l.c=b[i]>
[1]
https://xem.github.io/postit/Amazing. The crime and punishment example crashed my iPhone’s Google Chrome when I tap the URL haha
reply▲spacedoutman8 hours ago
[-] Seems like we have all built something similar.
hopefully mine can stand out with all the extra features i have managed to cram in
thelastgallon5 hours ago
[-] 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).
reply▲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.
https://github.com/planbnet/guitartabs
I love this.
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.
I feel this is more of a fun toy project because if i used it every day my browser history cache and browser performance would get annihilated
reply▲huhtenberg11 hours ago
[-] 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.
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!
reply▲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.
--edit--
test link: https://linqshare.com/#eJxtkM9KxDAQxl-lzLmHrv8Ova3IHlz04BY8F...
urbandw311er9 hours ago
[-] Neat. But why would you auto-set the title from markdown heading syntax when it doesn’t support markdown? (Or any rich text in fact)
reply▲You can still write markdown. Nobody prevents you.
reply▲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 :)
reply▲The http://go/fmt-err? =) Yes, it is mine.
reply▲reconnecting11 hours ago
[-] Are
<head>, <body>, and </html> missing intentionally?
Safari 15.6.1: Unhandled Promise Rejection: ReferenceError: Can't find variable: CompressionStream
I probably shouldn’t presume to speak for the OP, but given that they’re optional, I would think so, yes.
reply▲Love your other tools, btw!
reply▲This hack has completely disrupted my afternoon! Perhaps even forever after.
reply▲this is indeed minimalistic :)
reply▲jaysonelliot12 hours ago
[-] 546,229 character-length URL for the Crime and Punishment example.
Half a megabyte for a URL. That certainly is a thing.
Can you make it monospace by default, so that this can be used as a code snippet bin?
reply▲reply▲throwaway15012 hours ago
[-] How do you share after that? I can open devtools and change the attribute but the URL doesn't update after that.
reply▲Update the text a bit to trigger save event.
reply▲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
reply▲LordDragonfang12 hours ago
[-] It would be neat if ctrl+s offered to download the textarea to a .txt file.
reply▲desireco4212 hours ago
[-] The only thing missing is markdown and few themes. I think this is awesome idea for sharing. Love what you did with it.
reply▲Now what if it didn't pollute browser history
reply▲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.
denisinvader12 hours ago
[-] hash part of url only available in the browser, as far as I know, server doesn’t have access to # value
reply▲jamesdwilson11 hours ago
[-] very easy for the server to intentionally (or by compromise) add a one liner to send the hash text up.
reply▲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.
reply▲throwaway15012 hours ago
[-] 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.
reply▲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.