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URL

URL

Uniform Resource Locator. A standard way to address any resource on the internet. URLs are expressed as a text string of the form:

protocol://domain-name/pathname

Where protocol is any valid protocol, such as http, ftp, gopher etc.

One example of a URL that most people are now familiar with is the web address of each site and page.

See also: URI, URN.

URLs are defined by RFC1738 and RFC1808.

Whilst the HTTP specification does not limit the length of a URL, most browsers do have a limiting maximum size. Whilst this limit is far in excess of most browsing requests, current limits are:

Browser / Server	Limit	Source
Internet Explorer (browser)	2083 characters	Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 208427
Netscape (browser)	No limit
Apache (web server)	8190 characters (default)	www.jetools.com/content/resources/whitepapers/HTTP_GET_Requests.pdf
IIS 6.0 (web server)	16KB

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