Well, people do use del.icio.us in different ways.  Maybe a lot (or even  most) people don't write long comments or comments at all, but others do.  I think the people who do use the comments feature contribute a good bit to the del.icio.us community and should be encouraged.  Many times I've depended on the comments to help me decide whether a link was worth clicking on. 
 
I use comments to help me make better searches.  I try not to clutter my tags with stuff that will only be used once (though I'm not perfect at it!) and the description field gives me the opportunity to put extra key words or phrases that I don't feel belong as tags so that I can find stuff again easily through search. 
 
It would be a very simple modification to add the maxlength attribute to the description and then would not cause the frustration of having your text truncated.  You'd know immediately where the limit was.  It's just a usability issue.
 
I know there has to be a limit, depending on what kind of database you're using, the char types are typically limited at 256 characters, I think, so making it bigger would require changing the type which is a major enhancement, I know.  But if that can't easily happen, keeping me from losing data at the start would still be nice.
 
Lindsay
 
On 4/14/06, Larson, Timothy E. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Lindsay Donaghe wrote:
> Could you please have the max length set on text box that you can type
> the description in so that you don't type a whole paragraph and then
> find it truncated when you look at your saved link?  I end up with
> that happening all the time and it would be really easy to prevent
> from del.icio.us < http://del.icio.us/> 's side just by setting the
> maxlength attribute on the text area.  And then people wouldn't have
> to wonder what the max length is.
>
> I just hate losing data and having things cut off in mid-sentence or
> even mid-word.

When I was planning my own bookmark manager (before I discovered
del.icio.us) I also realized the need to truncate notes at some point.
I'd also decided on 255, but was going to have the engine be smart
enough to back up to the preceding whitespace and add ellipsis there to
indicate the truncation.  But then, I'd already decided I was perfectly
fine with silent truncation.

> Even better (but probably less likely) it would be nice if we could
> have more than 255 characters to work with.  About double that would
> be a lot more useful for me.

Gotta cut it somewhere.  255 chars is roughly 40 words (in English).  I
think in a majority of cases that's sufficient for a
reminder/summary/snippet.  Most of my links don't have descriptions, and
those that do are not very verbose.

Tim
--
Tim Larson
West Corporation, Interactive TeleServices
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