Re: [Lynx-dev] urls longer than 1024 characters

[Travis Siegel]

There is a limit, but I don't know what it is off hand.  It's listed in 
one of the RFCs, though I don't remember which one.

A quick search on google tells me RFC 1035 is the relevant RFC, and

that domain names themselves can't be longer than 63 characters. (I 
remember that), but

if you include subdomains (such as www.yourhost.com), they can be up to 
255 characters long.

This doesn't address the part after the slash in a url though, that's 
covered by a different RFC.

According to RFC 2616 which is the hyper text transfer protocol 
definition, there is no maximum length of a url, so that's interesting.

However, according to an article on geeks for geeks, they show the 
lengths of urls handled by different browsers to be the following:

Chrome, 2MB,

 Firefox unlimited, but only displays 64K characters

Edge only allows 2K as the limit of the path portion, but it maxes out 
at 2083 characters.

Opera allows for unlimited length,

Safari 80,000 characters,

but all of that is kind of moot, considering Apache only allows lengths 
of 4,000 characters.

I'd guess allowing lynx to handle 4K characters would solve most issues 
with url length, since apache handles the majority of web traffic.





On 1/25/2023 9:57 PM, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> Would it be possible for lynx to count the characters in an url and if the
> url is longer than 1024 characters offer to send the long url to an url
> shortening service and then catch the shortened url the service sent back
> and then open that shortened url instead?
> If lynx gets one of these shortened urls, will the url expansion on the
> other end cause lynx to error out or will the shortened url actually
> bypass the 1024 character limit on urls?
> I don't know that the internet has an actual limit on url length either.
>
>
>
> Jude <jdashiel at panix dot com> "There are four boxes to be used in
> defense of liberty:
>   soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> -Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
>
> .