Blogs

This has come up a couple times for me now so I thought I’d post this information for others so there is yet another place to find it.

It turns out that there are limits to the size or your querystring (what’s in your address bar). This depends on your browser:

Microsoft Internet Explorer

The maximum length of a URL in Internet Explorer is 2,083 characters, with no more than 2,048 characters in the path portion.

Firefox

After 65,536 characters, the location bar no longer displays the URL in Windows Firefox 1.5.x. However, longer URLs appear to work.

Safari

At least 80,000 characters will work.

Opera

At least 190,000 characters will work.

Apache Server

The official Apache documentation only mentions an 8,192-byte limit on an individual field in a request. However, independent tests indicate it’s closer to 4,000 Characters.

Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)

The default limit is 16,384 characters (yes, Microsoft’s web server accepts longer URLs than Microsoft’s web browser). This is configurable.

Perl HTTP::Daemon Server

Up to 8,000 bytes will work. Those constructing web application servers with Perl’s HTTP::Daemon module will encounter a 16,384 byte limit on the combined size of all HTTP request headers. This does not include POST-method form data, file uploads, etc., but it does include the URL. In practice this resulted in a 413 error when a URL was significantly longer than 8,000 characters.

I found this interesting article today. I was looking for an isNumeric equivilent in ruby and discovered someone had cobbled together the equivilent in every language he could think of:

http://www.rosettacode.org/rosettacode/w/index.php?title=IsNumeric

I’m always having trouble getting accurate window geometry values for the various browsers/doctypes and edge cases in between. So I never lose the link again, and to share the wealth I’m posting an exceedingly valuable link to Quirksmode on this subject:

http://www.quirksmode.org/js/doctypes.html

We upgraded our Google Analytics code today to use the new ga.js instead of the old urchin.js… We immediately had problems with the Script include they ask you to use.. Here is an example:

What’s with the embedded script tags? This violates what of the cardinal rules of embedded script tags with document.write. You’re supposed to properly escape the word ’script’. This is so that people with Norton installed on their systems, and also people running an IIS ASP.NET/ASP server environment don’t find their pages broken. Once we fixed this, it all started working again.

I don’t know where I found this..

Brian brought this post to my attention [read]. The general story (as I understand it) is this:

One of the MooTools developers, a guy named Olmo, gave a brief talk on the framework, during which he compared it to JQuery, Prototype, and others. This talk was taped, and you can watch it [here]. So in his talk he kindof says he doesn’t really look at the other frameworks that much because he doesn’t have time or whatever.. and he’s more interested in MooTools.. fair enough.

At any rate, he makes some untrue statements about JQuery in particular.. probably out of general not-knowingness, and does a little trashtalking. This got noticed.. some guys complained, and then #@$& hit the fan. Olmo’s been ousted from the Mootools dev team subsequently.. and got totally slammed in the process (in a very public way).

So here’s my take. I think some sort of an apology or correction was definitely in order. It should have come from Olmo, not Valerio. And if Valerio had to do it because Olmo wouldn’t, then I sortof think it’s interesting he slammed Olmo as bad as he did.. I mean this isn’t the first time there’s been a little inter-framework trashtalking. I sortof think when that happens we should just dust ourselves off and keep going. Besides, with respect to Resig, jQuery and all them who I totally respect too, what he said wasn’t really even that bad – not bad enough to get canned anyway.

Can’t we all just get along?

Often times, I want to take a screenshot of a website that I either really like or really hate. Of course there are ways to do this in your OS – with some keystroke, then opening the file in photoshop or something for editing.. but there is an easier way.

Fireshot! This is a great little plugin for Firefox that lets you take an image of the ENTIRE page (even if its really long) or just the visible area. You can automatically save it to a certain folder or open it up quickly in the lightweight editor to add captions or black out personal details if necessary.

Anyway, if you are an admirer of design and want to capture things you see online for inspiration later, try Fireshot.

Some exciting news last week.. Ruby on Rails 2 is now officially out! Read about it here: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/12/7/rails-2-0-it-s-done

Instead of major changes to the framework, there are a lot of ‘maturation’ type changes.. improvements to the underlying code base, bug fixes, and a few new features. Here’s a snapshot of some of them:

• Support for asset servers
• Partial Layouts
• HTTP Authentication
• Native support for MIME types
• Some improved exception handling and debugging features
• Improvements to ActionPack and ActionMailer
• Asset Caching
• Improved ActiveRecord validations
• and much much more..

This is from a while back but I dont think it made it on my blog.

I just finished giving a talk at the Google Web Toolkit conference in San Fran on JavaScript. Thanks to everybody for coming and for participating! Incase you are looking for my slide deck or source code you can find it here: http://www.nitobi.com/gwt/