[thelist] Maximum URL/bookmark length

Lee kowalkowski lee.kowalkowski at googlemail.com
Wed Jul 26 05:11:01 CDT 2006


On 25/07/06, Christian Heilmann <codepo8 at gmail.com> 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.

There's this in the HTTP spec (http://www.rfc.net/rfc2616.html#p19):
- - -
      Note: Servers ought to be cautious about depending on URI lengths
      above 255 bytes, because some older client or proxy
      implementations might not properly support these lengths.
- - -

So not necessarily a client limitation, might depend on which proxies
are being used too...

You could include a dynamic test of your client as part of the
functionality.  E.g., serve a page which which requests a resource
like http://www.foo.com/test?bar=xxx, where xxx is actually however
many exes required to make the length of the URL 2000 characters long.
 Your test resource just needs to check the length of the received
"bar" parameter.

How many bytes do you need to represent a stop over?

-- 
LK



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