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If a form has a TEXTAREA and a SUBMIT button, how much text can a user type
in the textarea? What I mean is, what is the limit of characters that can
be submitted from the HTML form?

I can't imagine 2000 characters being sent in a URL so I suppose I would use
POST instead of GET, but does anyone know if and what the limit is?

Guy

in post <news:MQ_zb.5018$>
Guy said:

> If a form has a TEXTAREA and a SUBMIT button, how much text can a user type
> in the textarea?

it depends on the user agent.

> What I mean is, what is the limit of characters that can
> be submitted from the HTML form?

pre HTML4 attribute values were limited to 1024 chars. HTML4 changed to
64k chars which is SGMLs max value however:

"These are the largest values permitted in the declaration. Avoid fixed
limits in actual implementations of HTML UA's"
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/sgmldecl.html

--
brucie
05/December/2003 10:41:52 pm kilo

In article <bqpv26$241ln8$>, brucie01
@bruciesusenetshit.info says...
> in post <news:MQ_zb.5018$>
> Guy said:
>
> > If a form has a TEXTAREA and a SUBMIT button, how much text can a user type
> > in the textarea?
>
> it depends on the user agent.
>
> > What I mean is, what is the limit of characters that can
> > be submitted from the HTML form?
>
> pre HTML4 attribute values were limited to 1024 chars. HTML4 changed to
> 64k chars which is SGMLs max value however:

Was that 1024 limit on GET rather than POST, though? IIRC the limit was
quite ambiguous, depending on the UA, as you said, though Netscape
documentation mentioned 2,048 some time ago.

--
Hywel I do not eat quiche
http://hyweljenkins.co.uk/
http://hyweljenkins.co.uk/mfaq.php

Hywel Jenkins wrote:

> In article <bqpv26$241ln8$>, brucie01
> @bruciesusenetshit.info says...
>
>>> What I mean is, what is the limit of characters that can
>>> be submitted from the HTML form?
>>
>> pre HTML4 attribute values were limited to 1024 chars. HTML4 changed to
>> 64k chars which is SGMLs max value however:
>
> Was that 1024 limit on GET rather than POST, though?

Neither. It was a limit on the input control itself.

URLs do not have a limited length, so in particular, there is no limit to
the size of a GET request.

Certainly any sized file can be transmitted in an HTTP POST request (think
file upload forms), so the size of a POST request must also be unlimited.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me - http://www.goddamn.co.uk/tobyink/?page=132

in post <news: et>
Hywel Jenkins said:

>> pre HTML4 attribute values were limited to 1024 chars. HTML4 changed to
>> 64k chars which is SGMLs max value however:

> Was that 1024 limit on GET rather than POST, though?

theres no distinction. attribute values are just 64k

HTTP1.1 says it puts no limit on the length of GET and servers should be
able to handle it but if they cant return a 414.

IE<3 url limit is 1k, IE3+ 2k. opera<3.2 is 256. opera 3.5+ is 1k. (may
be more now but i couldn't find it). couldn't find anything for NS/moz

--
brucie
06/December/2003 08:19:13 am kilo

Toby A Inkster wrote:
> URLs do not have a limited length, so in particular, there is no limit to
> the size of a GET request.

Most servers do put a limit on GET length, though.

brucie <> wrote:

>>> pre HTML4 attribute values were limited to 1024 chars. HTML4
>>> changed to 64k chars which is SGMLs max value however:
>
>> Was that 1024 limit on GET rather than POST, though?
>
> theres no distinction. attribute values are just 64k

But attribute values are quite distinct from form field values.
Attribute values are something that resides in an HTML document,
whereas form field values are (normally) entered by the user.

In practical terms, it's best to stay well below 1024 characters,
though the actual limitations are usually somewhere around 2000.
More info: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/methods.html#exc

(That means keeping URL length below 1024. And since you cannot know
the size of actual data submitted, it's safest you use method="POST"
for anything that isn't something like a search form submission with a
relatively small set of fields.)

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

in post <news:Xns94491B4672D23jkorpelacstutfi@193.229.0.31 >
Jukka K. Korpela said:

>> theres no distinction. attribute values are just 64k

> But attribute values are quite distinct from form field values.
> Attribute values are something that resides in an HTML document,
> whereas form field values are (normally) entered by the user.

the way i was looking at it was that the text entered still ends up as
an attribute value of the element.

--
brucie
06/December/2003 10:48:26 am kilo

brucie <> wrote:

> the way i was looking at it was that the text entered still ends up
> as an attribute value of the element.

Nope. If I have, say, <input type="text" name="foo"> and you type "bar"
into the text input box corresponding to this element, as created by a
browser, then "bar" does not become any attribute value. If I had
<input type="text" name="foo" value="brucie">, the situation would be
the same; the value of the form field "foo" would be "bar", and
"foo=bar" would be inserted by the browser into the form data set, and
hence into the URL (when method="GET" is used), but this would not
change the element's attributes the least. (The value attribute would
still be _relevant_ too, if the form contains a reset button, which
shouldn't normally be there, but I digress.)

The input data, which becomes the value of a field, might be
accessible, via a Document Object Model, as a property of an element.
If it's called attribute in that context, that's misleading, but still
does not change the HTML element's attributes the least.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html