Website design and Joliet filename standards

[Picture North Carolina]

I ran into a problem here. Do the Joliet file name standards apply to website design? Are there any browsers or OS's out there that may have problems resolving images with filenames exceeding 64 characters? Or does the Joliet standard only apply to files on a given PC and the OS?

[Pete]

I'm probably wrong here, but I think it most probably depends on the OS that's the web server.

If you're on Unix/Linix, then the filenames will be restricted to what that platform conforms to.

And so forth...

[Picture North Carolina]

Hmmmmm... good point. May very well depend more upon the server platform than the browser client. I'll email the host (hostgator) for support and see what they say. Thanks.

[Pete]

I don't think there's any big restriction on the lengths of file names. I think that 256 is the ultimate maximum though.

There is of course a restriction what characters you can use though. Although most browsers and web-services should be able to mangle any non-standard characters into the %20 (hex) type tag.

[TheHoff]

Since the image has to be considered valid by the web server AND the client's browser, I would play it safe and rename the images.

(This isn't from experience, though, just a guess. You could always fire up a sample page with long image names and then do a http://browsershots.org/ check to see if any fail.)

[Picture North Carolina]

From hostgator support (I didn't check this time, but from past experience I think Apache / Linix):

Long filenames are usually a bad idea, but not for technical reasons. If you must use long filenames, then the limit is 255 bytes. Please let us know if you have any other questions.

[Pete]

Dang. I was one out!!

[Picture North Carolina]

Dang. I was one out!!

No, you weren't! He's a Linix guy... they think in terms of 0-255! ;)

[Faolan]

Nothing to do with Linux it's down to DNS and the RFC spec.

Every domain name ends with a . so Photography-on-the.net. this is invisible to everyday usage but this is why you can only have 255 characters length for a DNS name.