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Instead of going via pixels, why not use a SVG favicon and directly store markup inside it and extract it?

Use this favicon.svg:

    <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
    <circle cx="50%" cy="50%" r="50%" fill="orange"/>
    <p>hello HN!</p>
    </svg>

    <link id="favicon" rel="icon" href="favicon.svg" type="image/svg+xml">

    <script>
    fetch(favicon.href).then(r => r.text()).then(t => document.body.innerHTML += t.match(/<p[\s\S]*p>/)[0]);
    </script>

> You still need a tiny bootstrap loader to decode the image.

Nope, you can do it all in a single file with an html/png polyglot (and nowadays you can get better compression ratios with newer formats like webp).

https://web.archive.org/web/20120801001616/http://daeken.com...

You can use the favicon cache as storage too, by redirecting users across domains. It's been proposed as a potential fingerprinting risk[0], and if a browser naively reuses the cache for incognito mode, it could be used to track users across browser profiles.

[0]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/browser-track...

PNG has comment chunks tEXt, zTXt, and iTXt. You can have a completely normal image whose file is stuffed with as much content as you want. That is less fun, I suppose.

Is this timing coincidence? I just submitted 1h (30 mins before this) ago a website I just made about storing your stock porfolio in a URL + favicon!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48606396

I found the agressively staccato, clearly LLM-generated content extremely difficult to read.

Oh, I am so aligned with this mentality:

    A monitor is storage.

    A keyboard is storage.

Best thing is, nobody really knows if their chicken casserole recipe isn't just a handle to a carefully constructed GUID pointing across to .. lets say, for humor .. a thousand different forum postings ...

I do have to wonder if the author is familiar with PoC||GTFO, for this is certainly a technique one will find deep within the depths of the Alchemist Owls' holy tomes...

Fun Fact: You can use any inline SVG for a favicon and keep it right in the HTML document.

This also allows you to use an emoji directly as a favicon, like so:

  <link
    rel="icon"
    type="image/svg+xml"
    href="data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 100 100'><text y='.9em' font-size='90'>(your emoji here)</text></svg>"
  />

Cool! Here is a GH repo demonstrating unbounded favicons I made 11 years ago - it crashes some browsers - wanna guess how long it took each one to fix it :D https://github.com/benjamingr/favicon-bug

> The length header is important because the image itself may contain unused pixels at the end. If there's no length value, there's no way to know where the real payload stops.

Not really, can’t you just pad with 0 bytes and stop reading when you encounter one that’s not part of the current Unicode codepoint?

This is one of those projects that's completely impractical but makes the web more interesting. I love seeing people explore weird constraints just to see what's possible.

Love it. Did you see the old effort to store the page in the url? https://github.com/jstrieb/urlpages

I'd imagine the (aggressive) caching of the favicon by browsers makes it a challenge, but you could generate the favicon dynamically, then have JS extract the sequentially. Basically streaming arbitraily large content to a webpage via favicons. Via blocks of 239 bytes.

It may be a fun, novel way to proxy webpages that are otherwise blocked. Though, i guess, the service rendering the favicons can just as easily be blocked then.

Have an index.html that's also (byte-to-byte equal) served as favicon.ico. If that page "works" and the favicon doesn't show garbage, it is a website stored in a favicon (by my standards).

How long before someone ports DOOM into a favicon? ^_^

(For the technical gurus here, would that even be possible?)

Painful read.

Related interesting project: https://github.com/EtherDream/web2img

Hmm this is cool but what are the practical use cases?

It didn’t load first time round on my browser (Brave) without disabling its prevent tracking feature…

The browser already asks for the favicon on every page. Might as well put it to work.

also https://pong-in-a-favicon.franzai.com/ for further favicon (mis)use

Pretty cool tbh!!! Would have loved seeing the decoder code!!!

It's also pretty interesting to think how an attacker could exploit images on his behalf. Never thought that would be a way!!!

Thanks!

Wait 'til the author discovers that you can use ping (ICMP) to transfer data, too! :)

I would have used a minimal service worker to unpack the web data and present it as if it were just a normal page being loaded.

Honestly it didn't interest me, but I do remember from back in the days full websites rendered by a browser from... Empty files. https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/css-without-html

A neat improvement would be to make the decoder into a bookmarklet. This would avoid the overhead of serving the script. Of course you would rely on the user having the bookmarklet installed, but when you serve HTML you also rely on the user having a web browser installed.

Very cool. I wonder is it possible to make a simple game with also leveraging the webassembly?

Bravo Maestro! Wonderful performance! =)

I personally won't do things this way, but this is really cool and I could see the applications already.

Fascinating concept! Thanks for sharing this!

very cool and interesting after reading just the title I wrongly assumed this would be about svg

Is it cake? Game for devs.

Would have been more fun if the blogpost was rendered from the favicon.

You can literally just use the file itself as the favicon. There is no need to over complicate it.

cp index.html favicon.png

looks good

Surprised that a minimal "website" only requires a small image = few pixels = few bytes to store it? Um, ok.

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Amazing!

AI generated garbage. Blocked