Question

I have a webpage that the user inputs data into a textarea and then process and display it with some javascript. For example if the user types:

_Hello_ *World* it would do something like:

<underline>Hello</underline> <b>World</b>

Or something like that, the details aren’t important. Now the user can “save” the page to make it something like site.com/page#_Hello_%20*World* and share that link with others.

My question is: Is this the best way to do this? Is there a limit on a url that I should be worried about? Should I do something like what jsfiddle does?

I would prefer not to as the site would work offline if the full text would be in the hash, and as the nature of the site is to be used offline, the user would have to first cache the jsfiddle-like hash before they could use it.

What’s the best way to do this?

EDIT: Ok the example I gave is nothing similar to what I’m actually doing. I’m not cloning markdown or using underline or b tags, just wanted to illustrate what I wanted

Answer 1

Instead of trying to save stuff in the URL, you should use the same approach that is common in pastebins: you store the data , can provide use with url, containing an unique string to identify stored document. Something like http://foo.bar/g4jg64

From URL you get state or identifiers, not the data.