I see some web addresses that are probably a hundred characters long. However, fifteen digits would get you 999 Trillion different possibilities. Even if you need eighteen digits (I’m not even sure what that number is) I cannot imagine needing more letters than that to represent every distinct url possibility.
The URL has the advantage of being something that is easily remembered. In fact, that’s pretty much its raison d’être.
“boards.straightdope.com/sdmb” is easily carried about in your wetware.
“9J42KJ34K32J5M” isn’t terribly easy to remember, and it would be a bit of a bringdown to enter “9J42RJ34K32J5M” in the hopes of browsing the Dope, only to find yourself looking at the page of a hardware store in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan.
While 15 letters might be enough to distinctly represent every possible url, it’s not really smart to have a developer guess if he needs to edit /0000001.php or /A3094321.php instead of a descriptive though longer name like /accounting/2004/result.php.
Alot of the characters you see are also parameters to a script. For example if you have: http://borsen.dk/gazeller/idk/search?gy=2004&navn=&postnr=4800 then only /gazeller/idk/search refers to an actual script and the rest are parameters that direct that script to output something specific. I guess you could also compress that down to something like: http://borsen.dk/B390132?x=2004&y=&z=4800 but again you would loose any kind of structure and maintaining the website would soon become a huge guessing game.
Unlikely - the maximum length for a domain name is (IIRC) 63 characters, with many registration services restricting this further to 50 characters or less. It is possible to have much longer URLs, but that’s because the parsing of subdomains/folders etc is usually handled by the hosting server, not the routing process.
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I cannot imagine needing more letters than [18] to represent every distinct url possibility.only if you have first decided that possibilities exclude domain names longer than 18 characters.
As Larry says, you’d essentially be deciding that domain names aren’t really names, except by coincidence; they would be more like telephone numbers or vehicle registration IDs.
Roland
The present url system is to permit every individual now alive to have their own home page, sufficient space to publish every photo they or a friend has ever taken, record every utterance ever uttered and and every thought ever thunk.
My proposed scientific notation system would allow every sub-atomic particle to have such a site and would reserve several digits, perhaps the last twenty or so, as exponents.