I am not sure about the maximum length of a URL in Arachne, but I found one from
diabetes.about.com that dwarfs that 280-character example. I think the link
itself is 710 characters long, and one line comes to 712 characters. I don't
know how such a long line will look to others on Arachne list:
<p align="left"><a
href="/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.verity.fda.gov/search97cgi/s97%5Fcgi.exe%3Faction=View%26amp%3BVdkVgwKey=http%253A%252F%252Fwww%252Efda%252Egov%252Fora%252Ffiars%252Fora%255Fimport%255Fia6610%252Ehtml%26amp%3BDocOffset=1%26amp%3BDocsFound=522%26amp%3BQueryZip=diabetic%252C%2Bchinese%2Bherbal%26amp%3BCollection=all%26amp%3BSearchUrl=http%253A%252F%252Fwww%252Everity%252Efda%252Egov%252Fsearch97cgi%252Fs97%255Fcgi%252Eexe%253Faction%253DSearch%2526QueryZip%253Ddiabetic%25252C%252Bchinese%252Bherbal%2526ResultTemplate%253Dstndrslp%25252Ehts%2526QueryText%253Ddiabetic%25252C%252Bchinese%252Bherbal%2526Collection%253Dall%2526ResultStart%253D1%2526ResultCount%253D10%26amp%3Bhlnavigate=ALL"><font
color="#000000">More product alerts</font></a><font
color="#000000"> from the FDA concerning Chinese herbal
medicines.</font></p>
DOS Lynx386 couldn't handle it, even after editing on my part. It looks like
one about.com webmaster was trying to get in the Guinness Book of Records for
the longest URL. % escape codes are only needed in URLs when a character would
otherwise be illegal, such as %20 for the space. %2C for , (comma) is not
necessary; I have successfully dealt with URLs that contained commas. But
about.com goes crazy with commas, or maybe it's a bug in their software. Since
% is ASCII 37 (25 hex), there is never any need for '%25' in a URL, it only
messes things up with a browser that goes only one level deep resolving % escape
codes, thus resolving %255F into %5F but not resolving %5F into _. I believe
the base href was http://diabetes.about.com, so either this base href can be
prepended to this giant URL, or better, "/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=" can be
stripped. Now there ought to be a way to edit a link on the spot: Lynx has this
feature but Netscape Communicator as of v4.04 didn't.
Thomas Mueller
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
