Very cool! And highly useful for some things.

Former Google designer Nicholas Jitkoff, who’s now the vice president of design at Dropbox, has created a really nifty new web tool he’s calling itty bitty sites, or self-contained microsites that exist solely as URLs. You can create your own by following this URL: itty.bitty.site. From there, you can fill the equivalent of about one printed 8.5 x 11-inch page with any combination of plain text, ASCII characters, or emojis. The actual byte limit depends on where you’d like to share it; Twitter and Slack allow for around 4,000 bytes, while the Mac version of Chrome can accommodate up to 10,000 bytes.

The site isn’t actually hosted anywhere — the entirety of the webpage exists as a URL compressed using what’s known as the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm. In an explanation page for itty bitty sites — stored, of course, as an itty bitty site — Jitkoff says this allows for a “significant reduction in size for HTML, and allows for a printed page worth of content in many cases.” From there, the compressed content is converted from binary into a string of characters that can function as a standard web link. The actual data is stored in the end of the link, comprised of everything after the # symbol. You can also share itty bitty sites as QR codes as well, so long as the site can be compressed into about 2,610 bytes.

Source: This amazing new web tool lets you create microsites that exist solely as URLs – The Verge