4 ms·

What’s the problem with longer length tlds?

• paulryanrogers 5y ago
  In practice URLs often cannot be more than 2K characters. It's also more work to type and bytes to transmit and harder to see on small screens. For many use cases these are irreverent, but they do matter to some.
  • jefftk 5y ago
    Where is 2K a limit these days?
    • 7steps2much 5y ago
      Chromium based browsers! > The Google Chrome browser supports a maximum length of a web page URL of 2 MB (2048 characters) in size. taken from [0]. Do note that this is a restriction created by the browser developers. In theory a URL can be of arbitrary length. Some browsers (like Firefox) do comply with this, though they might now show the full URL to the user, cutting it off after a certain number of characters. [0]: https://mywebshosting.com/what-is-the-maximum-url-length-limit-in-browsers/#URL_Overview https://mywebshosting.com/what-is-the-maximum-url-length-lim...
      • sokoloff 5y ago
        That would be 2KB (the error is in the reference material; you cited it faithfully).
      • eat_veggies 5y ago
        What's interesting is how 2048 characters is 2 KB (a factor of 1000 difference) but this conversion of 2 MB = 2048 characters seems to have been copy-pasted around the web
      • hackerbee 5y ago
        2MB would be 2 million characters - if using ASCII characters, a bit less for special characters in UTF-8
      • TheDong 5y ago
        Experimentally, you can easily verify that 2MB is the actual limit, not 2048 characters. For example, the following domain renders just fine, despite being ~2076 characters long: https://postman-echo.com/get?foo1=aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa https://postman-echo.com/get?foo1=aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa... See the upstream chromium docs: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/docs/security/url_display_guidelines/url_display_guidelines.md#url-length https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/... I don't think adding ~10 or so characters to the TLD meaningfully impacts this limit.
  • fivea 5y ago
    > In practice URLs often cannot be more than 2K characters. It's also more work to type and bytes to transmit and harder to see on small screens. The longest vanity TLD I could find was .travelersinsurance. Two dozen characters are nothing more than a rounding error in the 2k character limit. You routinely pass 10 times more characters in path and query parameters than you do in the domain name. Also, how often do people type in URLs instead of clicking links? Also, keep in mind that some browsers are starting to hide path and query parameters in the address bar and instead only show the domain name. I presume that makes domain names and TLDs more relevant in terms of name recognition.
• gray_-_wolf 5y ago
  As non-native speaker, I always have to google how to spell `engineering`. And you can't really auto-correct domain name.