URLFormJS VS pastml

I'm concerned about the `#` character in the URL.

# means fragment and that's kept local and not sent to the server unless client side Javascript sends it to the server. I would use an identifier that doesn't already mean something to the URL.

See https://github.com/Cyphrme/URLFormJS#query-parameters-fragme... (Also see https://github.com/Cyphrme/Path)

For an example where this is relevant: https://cyphr.me/ed25519_tool/ed.html#?msg_encoding=Text&msg...

And see https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986#section-3.5

I wrote a library for storing application state in the URL. Its novel feature is using fragment query, which prevents the information from being sent to the server.

https://github.com/Cyphrme/URLFormJS

I would love to see it get more use.

Here's a small demo: https://cyphrme.github.io/URLFormJS/#?first_name=Bob&last_na...

See my other comment on this page for some other examples of its use.

I imagine I'm not the first one to think of this, but a little while back I wrote a toy pastebin-like webpage that stored the code being rendered directly in the URL (with base64 and gzip compression to make it a bit smaller, although it still was quite large by usual standards). My thinking was that rather than having a centralized app for this publicly available, making a small page that could be statically hosted would make it easy for people or organizations to host their own page with whatever security they need (e.g. behind a firewall or VPN) and then the links could be shared privately on Slack or whatever without a need to add functionality for determining who should have access or how long to keep the code snippet around and instead just piggyback off of the privacy of whatever channel/DM they sent it across and how long the Slack instance is configured to retain history.

When I first came up with this idea, I was going to write some sort of server backend rather than just doing everything in the frontend, but once I started actually working on it, I realized that it wouldn't really add any value and it would make it a bit more annoying for people to self-host. Since then, I've wondered a bit how viable "static pages with state in the URL that can be easily self-hosted" would be as an alternative to a desktop GUI or Electron app for more technical users. One of the nicest parts of this approach to me is that I was able to make in only a few hours one evening despite knowing only the basics of webdev from maybe 8-10 years ago and next to nothing about programming GUIs in general. This makes me think that it wouldn't be too hard for people to fork and modify it to their own liking (e.g. changing the hard-coded style settings for rendering the code snippets), so there could be potential for an ecosystem to grow organically around something like this.

In case anyone is curious to take a look: https://gitlab.com/saghm/pastml/