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Comment by maxloh | Hacker News Reader

Per the spec [0], a URL can hold at least 8,000 characters.

> It is RECOMMENDED that all senders and recipients support, at a minimum, URIs with lengths of 8000 octets in protocol elements. Note that this implies some structures and on-wire representations (for example, the request line in HTTP/1.1) will necessarily be larger in some cases.

Mainstream browsers support at least 64,000 characters [1], and Chrome supports up to 2MB [2].

[0]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110#section-4.1-5

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/417184/

[2]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/s...

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Chrome limit is 2MB, Firefox is 1MB, WebKit is no limit.

Here is the Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky:

- https://medv.io/goto/crime-and-punishment-by-fyodor-dostoevs...

LOL Tapping the address bar crashed my Chrome on mobile.

loaded OK for me on mobile safari.

Loaded fine for me too -- but like parent, tapping the address bar to share afterwards crashed it on Android here :)

My Firefox on mobile seemingly handled it fine.

For what it's worth, there might be a 2GB limit on the iOS side.

https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/...

Works fine on Win11 Edge

Interesting, in Firefox mobile (actually fennec) if I tap the address bar, I get an empty text box.

EDIT: actually I can edit the URL, but it takes a while to load.

hmmm makes me wonder if you could train llms on gzipped text. would save a lot of tokens that way.

Incredible.

My absolute favorite thing about modernity is how enabled we are to riff on a riff of a riff.

In 1346, if a blacksmith came up with something cool, its quite possible that it died with them.

One thing I've learned from checking up on assumptions I've had about history is that it's easy to underestimate people in past times. They were probably better at communicating this stuff than you think.

This unfortunately immediately crashed my android firefox nightly browser. Amusingly it loaded the page, but one click on the address bar sent me straight to the home screen

For me on IronFox it showed an empty URL bar but loaded after what felt like 5 seconds.

I find it interesting that when you read this comment, the whole book is already on your computer. And it gets rendered when your press the link.

Edit: actually not true since you use a url shortener

I can open the page with the book text on mobile Safari, but iOS seems to cut off content when trying to copy/share the page URL. I can't get it to survive a round-trip to Notes. Might be a good thing to note for mobile users that if they write too much attempting to save their link will corrupt it.

First time I tried to open that link on my Pixel, it crashed Chrome, lol. Worked the second time though

I guess the surveillance industry has enough incentives to make this ever larger, so they can fit more utm-trackers, campaign-ids, referal trackers and whatnot in URLs.

It's truly insane how large typical share-URLS for content on instagram, youtube or any other large platforms are. URLs that could've been example.com/t/some-large-enough-id?time=13337 are stuffed with hundreds of characters, just to gather more data on people using these links.

> Per the spec [0], a URL can hold at least 8,000 characters.

> It is RECOMMENDED that all senders and recipients support, at a minimum, URIs with lengths of 8000 octets in protocol elements.

It is always worth remembering that, unless you have already ensured that the content has been rendered into a URI-safe subset of ASCII, a character and an octet are not the same thing.

Very good point indeed. In the worst case scenario, you would only have 1/5th of that capacity

What could the reasoning behind allowing anything beyond 64.000 characters possibly been? Even 64k seems unnecessarily large.

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