Re: Form input and output (was: <pre>)

Paul Burchard (burchard@horizon.math.utah.edu)
Fri, 7 Oct 94 13:21:36 -0600

liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Daniel LaLiberte) writes:
> Another related issue is how large VALUE strings and
> input fields can be. Servers have to know how large of a
> VALUE string they can send, and clients have to know how
> large of an input string they can send. Similarly, how
> large can URLs be?

The HTML 2.0 definition unfortunately currently limits both URLs and
VALUE attributes to 1024 characters (the SGML LITLEN parameter).

I would like to know is whether there is there any specific reason,
based on current practice, for this rather small value. I would
advocate increasing LITLEN to the maximum possible value consistent
with the limitations of current practice. (The only browser I know
that does any truncatation of FORM fields sans MAXLENGTH is
MacMosaic, and it appears to truncate them to an unacceptable 256
characters.)

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Paul Burchard <burchard@math.utah.edu>
``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...''
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