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A URL Lengthener

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Re: A URL Lengthener

#41
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)_/¯

I don't understand how that could be (!).

Re: A URL Lengthener

#42

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 spent some time looking at similar specs for more recent browsers, but wasn't able to find anything useful. This was for a proof-of-concept I made that stores entire web pages in URLs (creatively named "URL Pages") by base64-encoding them and putting them in the URL fragment (the part after the "#").

https://github.com/jstrieb/urlpages

The URLs this thing generates get pretty damn big sometimes, since I never got around to implementing compression. I can confirm that massive URLs from pages with inline images do work, but probably take some not-so-optimized code paths because they make my computer's fans spin up. Click at your own peril:

https://git.io/Jss7V

Re: A URL Lengthener

#45

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…

"At least" seems like a very good way of introducing a DoS vector.

I think that 1024 was probably too short as a limit, but I think that it does make sense to impose an arbitrary upper bound to reject malformed requests early.

I don't see what you mean by "the HW vendor's problem", I can assure you that any browser in existence is going to have an issue if you send a 1TB URL, while the NIC will have no issue transmitting it.

Re: A URL Lengthener

#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...

Re: A URL Lengthener

#48

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…

And here's the answer to the sibling asking why it's a problem, since they mean exactly the same on practice :)

What it literally means and what people understand when reading it aren't the same thing. On this case, for people creating sites, "up to" leads immediately into the real meaning of the phrase, while "at least" strongly implies the opposite. But for people creating browsers, the implication is inverted.

Re: A URL Lengthener

#50
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? The browsers I usually use to test if a site works without HTTPS (IE6 and IE8 on XP SP2) can't load it. Weird!

the http url is a 301 redirect to https so thats why it doesn't load ultimately

Disappointing; that doesn't really count!
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