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Aug. 10, 2007 at 2:19pm
Long URLs create interesting wrap-effect in Firefox
In the process of trying to figure out what in the world was wrong with my stylesheet, I went to W3 to validate it (and, although it is irrelevant to this post, I found my problem in a typo. Isn't it always a typo?) Since I am lazy about these kinds of things, I did the validation by direct input rather than finding and uploading the actual file, and something entirely odd happened: the URL bar contained something that looked like a solid black mess. After one forced shutdown due to being worried that something had gone wrong, I copied and pasted the content of the bar into a text document and lo and behold! It was the URL (a 34 000 word one, no less, due to the direct-input validation's method of incorporating all the CSS into the URL) and because of its length, it had wrapped over itself.
Testing proceeded, and it turns out that Mozilla Firefox (currently 2.0.0.3) wraps URLs at around 1800 chracters - and it wraps straight over itself. The result looks quite messy, but remains completely valid. Personally, I found it rather cool-looking, but it is obviously a problem as a big cloud of a mess in the URL bar would worry the unexperienced user (it worried me, initially) who unwittingly visits a page with a long URL. The bug has been reported, and I am sure it will eventually be remedied. As for other browsers, Internet Explorer seems to solve the problem by not allowing URLs beyond a certain length to be copied into the URL bar, and by not displaying long URLs of the generated variety. Safari simply allows the text to go on, sans wrap. More sensible. A little less nifty-looking.
Posted in CSS, Deep Thoughts, Odds 'n Ends by Anna Bjork
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