Posted by David on 11/16/06 02:24

Hello,

I have what should be a simple question but I can't find a reference
to the answer. I've been diging through the W3C and other sources
for the specifications on the <inpu> tag. Specifically, what is
the maximum recommended length that should be supported by the
name parameter?

I've been doing some simple HTML Forms and decided to see what
ASP and various other scripting languages could do. Anyway, like
most novice users it didn't take me long to "shoot myself in the
foot". I've been tying with MS IIS v6 on Windows XP, vbasic, ASP,
and a rather simple task of reading some Jet Databases with some
web forms.

Part of a form I created today took a while to diagnose the true
problem given the limited diagnostics on web projects. The line
in my HTML Form was something like the following:

<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="TwentyCharacterName1"
VALUE="TwentyCharacterName1"/>

The complaint offered by the server (detail diagnostics on) was
that ['<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN""]' wasn't a valid value. It took me
a while to discover what was unique about this particular line as
I've used this statement for years with other servers. (mainly
Apache) It seems that the real problem was that the 20-character
name was too long. I'm guessing that IIS somehow detected the
long name and generated an error my IE v7 browser could understand.
It didn't look like there was time for a double exchange between
the browser and server anyway. My problem was just using
recognizable names for rather large pages.

What is the maximum name length that browsers, servers,
and CGI Posts should understand?

Thank you,

David

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