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A URL Lengthener

aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com

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Re: A URL Lengthener

#31

Post by geocrasher »

Back in the early days of web hosting I recall that a customer had a domain name that was literally as long as ICANN would allow at the time. It was very nearly a full sentence. I don't recall the limit but this domain

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com

is 57 characters (not including .com) and I think that sounds familiar. One could have a lot of fun with that if they wanted to (and such as was done in this case).

Then there's

http://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogog...

Re: A URL Lengthener

#33

Post by Retr0spectrum »

TimLeland wrote: post #5

haha nice! I built the exact opposite the shortest possible URL shortener :) https://t.ly/

You've shortened 6,463,545 links so far. Assuming you're using a charset of [A-Za-z0-9], that gives you 14,776,336 total possible 4-character URLs. Almost half way there!

What's your plan once you reach the 4-character limit? Roll over to 5, or something fancier?

Re: A URL Lengthener

#35

Post by leblancfg »

schoen wrote: post #18
TimLeland wrote: post #5

haha nice! I built the exact opposite the shortest possible URL shortener :) https://t.ly/

For many years (but no longer) Vince Cate's Offshore Information Services had a DNS A record for the ccTLD "ai", so that http://ai/ was a valid URL that worked in browsers. (A few people also had e-mail addresses @ai.) Today, there are no longer any TLDs of any kind with their own A records. https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone

Neat! That link worked for me on the latest Chrome ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: A URL Lengthener

#36

Post by tgb »

lurkerasdfh8 wrote: post #17

fun 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…

Do you happen to have the exact wording? As far as I can tell these mean the same thing.

1. "You must support URL length up to 100 characters" -> your browser must support URLs that are 100 characters or less (and may or may not support longer ones)

2. "Your supported URL length must be at least 100 character" -> You must support URLs that are 100 characters or less (and may or may not support longer ones)

Re: A URL Lengthener

#37

Post by wccrawford »

vlovich123 wrote: post #24
lurkerasdfh8 wrote: post #17

fun 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 thin…

The URL can be up to 1024 characters. The browser must support at least 1024 character URLs.

They're 2 sides of the same coin, but MS didn't actually rephrase the sentence properly. Their version would have every URL have at least 1024 characters in it. Any less than that, and the browser should reject the URL as invalid.

Re: A URL Lengthener

#39

Post by ksec »

lurkerasdfh8 wrote: post #17

fun 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 remember there was a site / tools that fit the whole web page content within its URL. And it was precisely limited by this "standard" where every browser behaves differently.

Re: A URL Lengthener

#40

Post by bulletsvshumans »

tgb wrote: post #36
lurkerasdfh8 wrote: post #17

fun 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…

Do you happen to have the exact wording? As far as I can tell these mean the same thing. 1. "You must support URL length up to 100 characters" -> your browser must support URLs that are 100 characters or less (and may or may not support longer ones) 2. "Your supported URL length must be at least 100 character" -> You must support URLs that are 100 characters or less (and may or may not support longer ones)

"At least" means more than or equal to. In other words, the 'least' it can be is 100 characters, with no upper bound.
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