Hallmark and URL Length
My wife sent a Hallmark eCard to someone today. She picked a format then typed a paragraph or so of text. The length of her prose was nothing out of the ordinary.
Hallmark then generated an email to the recipient and CC'd my wife. In this email was a link to the card. However, it appears to me that Hallmark embeds everything relevant to the card in that URL. The URL that arrived in the email was 622 characters long. It had five querystring arguments, one of which was 422 characters long. (Which, in light of this post, put me into instant convulsions.)
Jakob Nielsen says URLs shouldn't be any longer than 75 characters. He labeled this as a top mistake of Web design in 2002:
"Long URLs break the Web's social navigation because they make it virtually impossible to email a friend a recommendation to visit a Web page. If the URL is too long to show in the browser's address field, many users won't know how to select it. If the URL breaks across multiple lines in the email, most recipients won't know how to glue the pieces back together."
I can't help but wonder why Hallmark wouldn't implement something like TinyURL: store the eCard settings in a database, then just tack a GUID onto the back of the URL. Yes, people could try random GUIDs (that post still makes me laugh), but even a 20-digit key would provide enough randomness to stave people off. (via Gadgetopia)
Hallmark then generated an email to the recipient and CC'd my wife. In this email was a link to the card. However, it appears to me that Hallmark embeds everything relevant to the card in that URL. The URL that arrived in the email was 622 characters long. It had five querystring arguments, one of which was 422 characters long. (Which, in light of this post, put me into instant convulsions.)
Jakob Nielsen says URLs shouldn't be any longer than 75 characters. He labeled this as a top mistake of Web design in 2002:
"Long URLs break the Web's social navigation because they make it virtually impossible to email a friend a recommendation to visit a Web page. If the URL is too long to show in the browser's address field, many users won't know how to select it. If the URL breaks across multiple lines in the email, most recipients won't know how to glue the pieces back together."
I can't help but wonder why Hallmark wouldn't implement something like TinyURL: store the eCard settings in a database, then just tack a GUID onto the back of the URL. Yes, people could try random GUIDs (that post still makes me laugh), but even a 20-digit key would provide enough randomness to stave people off. (via Gadgetopia)
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