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by indymike 1829 days ago
The spec is silent on length. 2000 bytes came from some web servers (old IIS comes to mind) that capped the URL at 2K or something close to that. So extra long URLS were problematic (and a lot of early web apps went nuts with parameters). So, max length is up to the implementer. All I know is that I've had to fix lots of code where someone assumed that 255 characters is all you'll ever need for a URL.
2 comments
tpetry 1828 days ago
255 characters is the default to a variable length string column in databases. So if a developer did not pay attention he just used the default which is in some cases to short for an url.
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masklinn 1828 days ago
> old IIS comes to mind

And msie for which it’s a hard limit not just a default.

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