29 January 2013
One-line browser notepad bookmark
I just saw this neat trick to turn your browser into a notepad by Jose Jesus Perez Aguinaga via hacker news. It’s an elegant use of the data URI schema to create an empty, editable page in one, short line:
data:text/html, <html contenteditable>
In case you missed it… that’s a URL. So, you can just go to that as a page, even bookmark it, and it'll work like a little built-in app. Furthermore, since all of the logic is stored directly in the URL, it will work even if you’re not connected to the internet.
scratch ← click to open the one-line notepad (you have to click on the page to start writing)
However if you’re gonna take the time to bookmark something, we can extend it to include a little bit of styling and to auto-focus the cursor onto the page:
scratch+ ← a slightly prettier version, click or drag to your browser bar
I called them “scratch”, because emacs has a buffer called *scratch* for the same purpose. Also, I really like data URIs.
