TinyLittleOffice: a lightweight office suite where the link is the document

The link is the document

TinyLittleOffice is a collection of lightweight productivity tools comprising a basic word processor, presentation builder, spreadsheet, calendar, and drawing tool. Its core idea is simple: create a document and receive a link, and that link is the document. The document data is stored in the URL itself rather than on a server, and there are no attachments. Export to a variety of formats is possible, but the link remains the primary artifact.

Because nothing is persisted server side, documents are, in theory, private, although that depends on what the server does when it opens the link. The approach exploits the long tail of seemingly random characters found in many URLs to stash data.

A resurrected idea

Using a URL to hold information is not entirely new. Paul Ford, the author behind the project, worked with Rich Ziade on TinySheet six years ago, a simple browser based spreadsheet that kept its data in the URL. The pair moved on, the sites fell off the web, and the old links broke. The concept has since been resurrected and expanded into a broader set of tools.

The server code is published on GitHub under the aboard io account, which should, in theory, ease concerns about the new links rotting away the way the old ones did.

Tradeoffs and disposable software

The Register tested the project and found it technically impressive: it can create short documents and spin up spreadsheets with ease, though it will not threaten LibreOffice. URLs can grow unwieldy when pasted into chat, although a URL shortener is available, albeit one that expires. The suite cannot upload video or images, and it is not collaborative in the style of Google Docs. Ford described its collaboration model as more like "handing out zines at a street fair."

Ford called the project "disposable software," a necessity given the constraints of cramming document data into a link. He contrasted it with modern systems that live on other people's machines, track users everywhere, and feed created content to LLMs. His aim, he wrote, was to build something for the people who spend their days in chat apps such as WhatsApp and Signal, coordinating mutual aid and talking politics and sports.

Sources: The Register