The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)

Re:The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011) by paulryanrogers on Saturday January 01, 2022 @01:12PM (#29760972)

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.

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Re:The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011) by fivea on Saturday January 01, 2022 @08:18PM (#29764728)

> 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.

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Re:The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011) by jefftk on Saturday January 01, 2022 @01:39PM (#29761217)

Where is 2K a limit these days?

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Re:The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011) by 7steps2much on Saturday January 01, 2022 @01:47PM (#29761303)

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-lim...

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Re:The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011) by eat_veggies on Saturday January 01, 2022 @01:52PM (#29761347)

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

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Re:The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011) by hackerbee on Saturday January 01, 2022 @01:54PM (#29761369)

2MB would be 2 million characters - if using ASCII characters, a bit less for special characters in UTF-8

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Re:The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011) by TheDong on Saturday January 01, 2022 @02:25PM (#29761724)

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=aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

See the upstream chromium docs: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...

I don't think adding ~10 or so characters to the TLD meaningfully impacts this limit.

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Re:The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011) by sokoloff on Saturday January 01, 2022 @01:52PM (#29761346)

That would be 2KB (the error is in the reference material; you cited it faithfully).

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