Ex-Google designer and present vice-president of design at Dropbox Nicholas Jitkoff has created a new web tool. The tool named as Itty Bitty creates a compressed link of HTML and other data, which can be shared with others.
Using this tool, you can create your own microsites, which are “contained entirely within their own link.” When the URL is opened, the data is loaded on the receiver’s side.
The itty.bitty tool offers that the chain algorithm results in a significant reduction in size for HTML and offers a printed page worth of content.
Once the content is compressed, the tool uses base64 encoding to convert it from binary data to a string of letters and numbers that come as a URL to the receiver. The process also involves fragments after the first hash (#) symbol to store the data in a section of the URL and make it unique in nature for every single microsite. Notably, the URL fragments are not sent to the server when requesting a site. Instead, Jitkoff states that the “Web browser (usually) uses them to scroll to a location on a page when it is loaded.”
How to use this tool
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 would 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.
According to Jitkoff, even this portion is kept private, because a web browser will usually not send that fragment of a URL to a server. “Once the link is sent and opened, it loads itty.bitty.site to reverse the process, which is done completely on device. The data is extracted, inflated, and then shown in the Web browser,” Jitkoff adds.