[sclug] URL encoding/decoding question

[David Given]

On Sunday 19 February 2006 17:32, Roland Turner (SCLUG) wrote:
[...]
> You are URL encoding _entire_ HTML documents? How long are the resulting
> URLs? Or are you URL-encoding for some other reason?

As an aside:

A while back I wrote a web-based space warfare game called Stellation. (Now 
defunct source code is available on Sourceforge, should anyone care.) The 
system it was written in couldn't generate images directly, so I called out 
to an external CGI script to generate maps. The main engine would encode the 
map data in the URL of the CGI call.

I discovered that most web browsers fail, horribly, when dealing with very 
long URLs. I had a number of outright crashes, some deeply bizarre graphics 
corruption when displaying the URL bar text, and occasionally the text of the 
URL itself would get mangled. This was testing with Mozilla and Internet 
Explorer (it was all pre-Firefox).

I sincerely hope that the crashes have been fixed by now, but they've probably 
been replaced with arbitrary limits to how long you can make a URL; either 
way, storing large amounts of data in a URL is definitely *not* a viable 
solution to anything...

-- 
+- David Given --McQ-+ "They laughed at Newton. They laughed at Einstein.
|  dg at cowlark.com    | Of course, they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
| (dg at tao-group.com) | --- Carl Sagan
+- www.cowlark.com --+ 

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