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A URL Lengthener

aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com

51–60 of 313 posts

Re: A URL Lengthener

#51
Reminds me of an API I worked on. We had a max length for some token. A client had an incrementing sequence number, so they decided to pad it out to the max length. It looked something like this:

A00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

A00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002

etc

Re: A URL Lengthener

#53
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes but "you must support up to 100 characters" also has no upper bound - supporting 200 characters also fits that requirement.

Re: A URL Lengthener

#54

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 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 o…

Ah yes. Checkbox Driven Development. AKA Monkey Paw Development, where you give exactly what was asked for; it remains surprisingly popular in the government and enterprise spaces.

Re: A URL Lengthener

#55

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…

It's been years since I've seen or heard an ad for dontbeaweekendparent.com, but I still remember it, even though there's zero chance I'll ever need their services. Sometimes a long domain name can be useful.

Re: A URL Lengthener

#56

Reminds me of an API I worked on. We had a max length for some token. A client had an incrementing sequence number, so they decided to pad it out to the max length. It looked something like this: A00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 A00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002 etc

That does solve the problem of having to worry about whether the data is sorted lexically or by numeric value.

Re: A URL Lengthener

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Ah yes. Checkbox Driven Development. AKA Monkey Paw Development, where you give exactly what was asked for; it remains surprisingly popular in the government and enterprise spaces.

Requirements are hard in dysfunctional organizations, or those with more stakeholders than capability and agility.

Re: A URL Lengthener

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a lot more likely that the commenter remembering something he read 28(!) years later didn't rephrase it properly.

Re: A URL Lengthener

#60
post #47

I love long URLs and build them into my apps for sharing. You can have powerful apps that are 100% clientside and use just a dumb file web server. For example, here's a URL that contains both the grammar for a language that compiles to CSS and also example code. Works like a charm. https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/#grammar%0A%20toolin...

Having written two apps that do this, I can confirm that it is an amazing technique, and criminally underutilized! My projects store and render entire pages from the URL and encrypt URLs (respectively):

https://github.com/jstrieb/urlpages

https://github.com/jstrieb/link-lock

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