Text 2990, 55 rader
Skriven 2008-04-08 11:08:36 av Sergey Sokoloff (2:5063/88)
   Kommentar till text 2965 av Scott Little (3:712/848)
Ärende: A length limit for a nodelist field
===========================================
And about 03:16 08 Apr 08 it was written from Scott Little to Sergey Sokoloff:

 SL>>> possibly limited in length (255)
 SS>> 255 will not suffice.

 SL> Per field, not per line?

 SL> I smell vanity domains, advertising and other nonsense...

Well, if per field and not per line, it suddenly starts looking much more sane;
but only until someone tries putting there a long enough URL, or some UTF-coded
CJK hieroglyphs, or both, in which case 255 will still not suffice. An example
of such an URL:

http://www.traditio.ru/index.php?title=%D0%98%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%8%%
%%5%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%B%%
%%D%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%A4%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B%%
%%5%D1%82%D0%B0&action=edit

(the character sequence "%%" is used here to mark the place where a line break
appears inside the URL, and then where the URL resumes; see the section 5.2.2.5
of FGHI URL v0.4 for details. The URL itself is only 246 characters long, but
a nodelist flag would need some prefix before an URL anyway...)

This example uses a Russian page title and a site running on MediaWiki engine.
With a Japanese or Chinese or Korean title the URL could be twice as long for
the same number of letters (glyphs).

I believe you are able to imagine some sane applications of URLs inside the
nodelist, I mean applications other than vanity domains, advertising and other
nonsense. But it's likely that some other FTSC_Public subscribers are not able
to imagine such applications, so I am going to suggest an example. Imagine such
a protocol and a corresponding nodelist flag that uses some URL to verify
some necessary credentials or to obtain a contact address which is then used
to establish a Fidonet session, i.e. to send and to receive mail. The page
referenced by such an URL may contain, for example, a public key, or a host
and a directory necessary to obtain mail via FTP, etc. Naturally, we'll need
to place such an URL in a field of the nodelist.

The maximum length of an URL is usually far more than 255. For example, an RFC
at http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2397 mentions that the SGML declaration
for HTML (defined at RFC1866) limits the number of characters which can appear
in a single attribute value literal, and the limit is 1024. In the blog at
http://roboshrub.blogspot.com/2008/03/microsoft-cripples-data-uris_06.html
it is mentioned that the limit of URLs in Internet Explorer is at least 32768
characters. And in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URL it was told that even
the previous versions of Opera had limits of 4096 characters.


With best Fidonet 2.0 regards,
Mithgol the Webmaster.

... 59. I will never build a sentient computer smarter than I am.
--- Orcs are near, Scott Little! My Golded 1.1.5-b20070503 is gleaming!..
 * Origin: I have a strange feeling, as if I already had a deja vu (2:5063/88)