Very neat idea, but I think the reliance in bit.ly is self-defeating. This kind of approach would allow people to distribute documents using the web without having to trust them to a particular server, which can be very convenient if your target audience is in a country where access to the server storing your documents can be closed.
I just can't see the gain here. You need a server to distribute the URLs in any case. You are just moving the data from the server that served the document to the server that servers the URLs. It is still the same data, just in different form.
For this to work you need to be able to recover the document from the URL locally.
Right, exactly. It's only really cool for magnet links because the law is different for "linking to content" vs "hosting content" right now.
One step further in this direction would just mean "including all the data for one or more documents on one page". You've just invented...a document, possibly with more than one media type.
Think about it this way: You have a 10K document which contains 200 bytes of link data; a URI to another hypertext document that is 5K in size...vs...you have a 15K document which contains 5K of "link data"; the other document.
I just can't see the gain here. You need a server to distribute the URLs in any case. You are just moving the data from the server that served the document to the server that servers the URLs. It is still the same data, just in different form.
For this to work you need to be able to recover the document from the URL locally.
How about saving the document?