David Gerard wrote:
Matt Brown wrote:
Which browsers actually have a problem with text
boxes over 32K? As I
recall, it's old browsers with a vanishingly small percentage of users
these days.
Old Netscape, some old Opera.
Nevertheless, I'm a big fan of the 32K limit. People who say the limit is
fine for *other* topics, but *their* topic requires EVERY LAST DETAIL IN
THE MAIN ARTICLE because the editors can't sort something out, well ...
I too would like to put in a word for article length limits. Whether
32K is still the optimal length would still be an open question; perhaps
it could be increased a little.
Section editing has only dealt with one of the problems that come from
these articles. It's not just slow browsers that are a problem. So
are slow internet connections. High speed service is not universally
available. Long articles that are heavily wikified are also bound to
put a strain on the system, which needs to determine which should be red
and which should be blue.
A further benefit of having length limits on articles is the effect on
writing styles. A good exercise for anybody who has just written an
article is to rewrite it and say the same thing with 75% of the words.
Article size is a bigger problem with Wikisource where people often
upload whole books as a single file, and then walk away without any
further editing. We currently have 752 files that exceed 100Kb in
length. 17 of them are more than 1Mb long, and the longest of these has
nearly 4.3Mb of text in Gothic Latin. For us it would be a big step
forward if everybody observed a 100Kb limit. :-)
Ec