[thelist] Maximum URL/bookmark length

John Dowdell jdowdell at adobe.com
Tue Jul 25 13:31:37 CDT 2006


Christian Heilmann wrote:
> We're just having a discussion here about the length of URLs and
> Bookmarks. While I am strongly opposed to URLs that are too long to
> read I need some factual information if there is a length restriction
> on browsers in order to when a URL cannot be bookmarked any longer.
> 
> The context is that we have a map application that will have up to 26
> stop overs in the driving directions which'll mean that we will get
> urls up to 2000 characters long.

I don't know that the various browser makers document this. I do know 
that towards the time of IE4 and Netscape Navigator that some browsers 
topped out at 128 characters. Towards 2000 or so URLs of up to 256 
characters were fine across common browsers. These days the limits are 
likely higher. Depends on your audience's choices in browsers, and what 
those browsers might describe of their capabilities.

One wrinkle is that very long URLs are sometimes used with hidden 
characters to do secret things... I've no discrete URL to pass for 
further investigation, but very long URLs might eventually end up as 
being too fragile for security and privacy protection.

I don't know your application, but might it be possible to store all the 
individual parameters for a given view within a serverside database, and 
reference each combination by a shorter identifying index...?
http://www.MyMapApp.com/?id=i87sT  (eg)

jd



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John Dowdell . Adobe Developer Support . San Francisco CA USA
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