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Comment by cobychapple | Hacker News Reader

What becomes possible? The entire internet could effectively get rid of hosting account providers, with each page in every site being contained in a hashify URL, and with each page linking to other pages using other hashify URLs.

Trouble is, there might be a DNS-like system needed to match hashify URLs to more human-readable strings (or a way for existing DNS to resolve to hashify style URLs).

Neat idea.

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The data needs to be stored somewhere. In their implementation they in effect use bit.ly as the hosting provider for the data by shortening the url's, so while it's a fun little experiment, it boils down to a content addressable system. We already have good examples of content addressable systems. Git for example is built on content addressable storage.

It also assumes that there's no limit on URL space that bit.ly provide. Tomorrow they could just max out the "long_url" field or whatever they call it to just accept 1500 chars or something

There is:

    "Storing a document in a URL is nifty, but not terribly 
    practical. Hashify uses the [bit.ly API][4] to shorten 
    URLs from as many as 30,000 characters to just 20 or so.
    In essence, bit.ly acts as a document store!"

http://tinyurl.com/3n6h8px

hence the "bit.ly – "rate limit exceeded" :\" message on top...

maybe switch to goo.gl?

This was my point, they're passing their 30,000 char URL to bit.ly to return a short URL (20 chars)

But what happens if bit.ly just say "Sorry incoming URLS (long urls) can only be a maximum of 1500 chars"?

And then the next paragraph:

  While the HTTP specification does not define an upper limit
  on the length of a URL that a user agent should accept,
  bit.ly imposes a 2048-character limit.

Wouldn't the document also be stored in your URL browsing history?

The real trouble is that when you link to a hashified URL, you are actually embedding in your web page (an encoding of) the content of the page you are linking to. Think matryoshka.

Not to mention that makes link cycles impossible.

Nah! I am pretty sure that a quine can be made using this! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)

Right. Even without link cycles, any link would have to contain (nearly) the whole internet.

in essence, this would be moving away from a model of "large networks of connected pages/sites" to "a large amount of single documents with no meaningful mechanism of inter-connectedness".

Think about this like a PDF where stuff is embedded instead of in separate files.

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