On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 4:39 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
The big trick is that these are generally for fields which have a database length limit of 255 *bytes*, which can be anywhere from 63 to 255 *characters* of UTF-8 text.
The 'maxlength' on the input field is enforced in Unicode *characters* by the browser.
I think the 200 is an arbitrary compromise to keep the in-browser limit from overflowing the field length in most European languages... but it's insufficient for non-Latin text.
. . . and the right solution here is probably just to convert all these fields to TEXT and allow for the possibility of much longer edit summaries if desired.