Introducing TinyLittleOffice.com

Paul Ford, on his company’s blog:

Everything in tech is huge right now. Every system lives on someone else’s machine and tracks you everywhere. All the content you make with those systems is being gobbled by LLMs.

So he made a tool to make documents whose content lives entirely in the URL. Here’s how it works, as described by a document of the tool itself :

1. You clicked on this link. That loaded the document data into your browser—but it didn’t know what to do with it.
2. Your browser asked for the website at TinyLittleOffice. That’s the code.
3. The code ran in your browser, and it converted and displayed the data after the “#” and painted it onto your screen.
4. Now you see the document!

Pretty damn cool! The entire premise hinges on the fact that browsers don’t send anything after the # to the server. From the threat model docs:

A document is its link. The whole of it, compressed, sits after the # of https://tinylittleoffice.com/<app>/#/v1/<app>/<payload>, and a browser never sends the part after # to any server. The site is static files on Cloudflare; there is no account, no database of documents in the clear and no server code that receives one

This project is at the intersection of two of my loves: 1) URLs. and 2) stripping things down to their essence.

Here’s Ford on Bluesky describing some of his process and decision making on the product:

Just me and a bot doing basic dictionary and encoding stuff, it's all pretty basic. By eliminating images and locking in things like font choice and pre-canning templates you just end up with very small documents in general.

Cool!