I've never thought about a practical URL that couldn't be accessed by specific browsers based on length as something someone would explicitly want versus something to avoid until this post.
A URL Lengthener
aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com
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Re: A URL Lengthener
#22haha nice! I built the exact opposite the shortest possible URL shortener :) https://t.ly/
Thankfully, your URL can be lengthened to this:
https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
Re: A URL Lengthener
#23Re: A URL Lengthener
#24fun fact. in the browser wars of 1993(?) i looked at the specs from netscape (mozilla dady for the young folks) and microsoft (what w3c? ha!) and netscape release a browser spec that said "X must support up to Y", as in "url must be up to 1024 chars", "cookies must be up to 1mb", etc... then microsoft release IE4 (or 6?) web spec. It was literally a copy of netscape's but with "up to" replaced with "at least". and fr…
I don't know. There's a lot of problems but to me "at least" sounds like a more helpful phrasing. Browsers run in such heterogeneous compute environments (even back then) that "up to" basically cripples you to the lowest common denominator of all platforms you target. "At least" makes it mostly the HW vendors problem. Sure, MS was encountering this problem more because Windows ran on such a large range of HW but think about what the world would look like today if you had browser vendors putting caps for desktop browsers based on what mobile could support.
EDIT: For some limits. For other limits "up to" wording may be more appropriate & is still in use (e.g. storage).
Re: A URL Lengthener
#25fun fact. in the browser wars of 1993(?) i looked at the specs from netscape (mozilla dady for the young folks) and microsoft (what w3c? ha!) and netscape release a browser spec that said "X must support up to Y", as in "url must be up to 1024 chars", "cookies must be up to 1mb", etc... then microsoft release IE4 (or 6?) web spec. It was literally a copy of netscape's but with "up to" replaced with "at least". and fr…
I was on a 12-person failed project, the kind of which you owe millions to the govt. We had a problem with the search, we couldn’t get performance.
I told my boss: “See, they wrote ‘The old search responded in 2 seconds. The new search must take at least the same time.’ We could almost add a sleep(2000) before starting the search.”
He went with it. They dealt to drop the requirement on the performance of the search on a “mutual agreement.”
Re: A URL Lengthener
#26Source code: https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
Great work!
A bit of an edge case, but you do not handle cyrillic (and potentially other non-latin URLs) correctly. кц.рф didn’t work for me.
Re: A URL Lengthener
#27Can you use these urls in tweets?
If so, how many of these urls would fit in a tweet?
Re: A URL Lengthener
#28> Disclaimer: Since there is a maximum letter count to a URL, there is a slight chance your resulting URL will be too long to use. No worries, try running it through a site like bit.ly and then paste that one over here. Every resulting URL ends up having a minimum number of characters, so your URL will still be plenty long! This seems like something you can trivially solve yourself. Is there any good reason why you p…
Since there really isn't any set maximum, I didn't have anything to base it off of. I might actually remove that section since I've seen 24k-long URLs work perfectly fine. Also I would have to do some reworking to have that happen since the url lengthening is all browser-side right now.
Re: A URL Lengthener
#29Can you use these urls in tweets? If so, how many of these urls would fit in a tweet?
i need to check, but i think twitter breaks when you paste one in :grimace:
Re: A URL Lengthener
#30> Disclaimer: Since there is a maximum letter count to a URL, there is a slight chance your resulting URL will be too long to use. No worries, try running it through a site like bit.ly and then paste that one over here. Every resulting URL ends up having a minimum number of characters, so your URL will still be plenty long! This seems like something you can trivially solve yourself. Is there any good reason why you p…
I think it is because it is not implemented the way (I imagine) URL shorteners to be implemented with a database back-end to map the short tokens to the actual sites. Instead it just performs a reversible transform on the URL. This way the site is really just a static website (and I imagine a lot cheaper for the owner who can't be interested in laying out a lot of money for this).
But this is just a lot of speculation on my part which means I'm probably wrong about at least one aspect.