Browser Notepad

Go here, tap or mouse click in the middle of the page, and start typing. It's a browser notepad. So cool!

This isn't actually a web page. It's just a bit of code instructing your browser to open an editable text window with certain characteristics. While most of us prefer to enter text into word processors or text editors, there are moments when it's handy to do so right in the browser. The downside is that when you close the window (or tab), all text is lost.

The gist of this is surprisingly unsurprising in and of itself. You've encountered countless thousands of text fields. But in this context, where the functionality is unexpected, it feels magical, kooky, even subversive. The mind starts eagerly cooking up possibilities.

Check out what this browser notepad thingee has fostered. Delighted coders and tinkerers (I want to say "hackers", but, like "southern heritage" or "Louis CK", the term's been removed from polite usage by our social overseers) have cooked up a profusion of improvements, modifying every element, and even adding auto-save routines to overcome the lost data issue (there's no reason why one couldn't, with sufficient determination, recreate most of the functionality of a full-fledged word processor...which would be, of course, laughably beside the point). See the comments here and here.


That outpouring illustrates why early web sites like Chowhound fostered a sense of wonder and unleashed such unexpected generosity. We'd all swapped food tips in various contexts; it wasn't so fresh a notion, really. But doing so online felt utterly new, and the shiny newness gave the proceedings an aura of kooky subversive magic.

And, like Chowhound, whoever first brewed up this little trick invested great care in configuring the parameters...which only seem inevitable.