How long can a webpage be?

Question

Bit of a bizarre question, but does anyone know the actual limit to the length of a webpage, and why it is the limit?

As an experiment, I'm using HTML and CSS to make a site that represents a journey to a scale of 1:1. I have a ul list of markers along the way that I have separated with large margins in the css. However, the longest margin I can get to work so far is

top-margin:100000cm;

Since there are 43 list items, that equates to 4,300,000cm, or 43Km. Does anyone know why it's hitting a limit around this mark, or how I might go about getting it longer? I'm using Safari for testing currently.

Answer 1

just a guess but 2147483647; max int value

Answer 2

There is no limit, as per any HTML/XHTML specification, so this is just the practical limit of the browser that you're hitting. How long a webpage can be is the same as asking how long a book can be.

Answer 3

This will depend on the browser. There shouldn't be any clear limit on the length of the HTML file. The pure "length", as in pixels, shouldn't have any clearly defined limit either. Only, the more elements there are in the page, the more the browser has to do, and the sooner it may run out of memory. Memory is about the only limit there is.

Answer 4

Besides a possible maximum int value, you need to consider the load time for the page. If your web page takes longer than a few seconds to show any interesting content, than you will lose people browsing your content. That's a more meaningful metric than a 1:1 scale metric.

Answer 5

It appears to simply be a maximum value that margin-top property can be set to. I've tried values up to 400,000cm with 100 elements and the page loads them all fine. I even tried incrementing that up to 1000 elements to see if the number was affected by load time, but nothing. It does appear to be an exact number somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 that it cuts off at and shortens down past that value.

Code I used (which worked, showed in full):

<?php

print "<ul>";
for ($i = 1; $i <= 1000; $i++) print "<li style=\"margin-top: 400000cm;\">{$i}</li>";
print "</ul>";
die();

?>

Answer 6

There is no limitation. Even in terms of size of integer, you can create divs in other divs and have all of them biggest value of margin value so your page will not be limited.

Answer 7

18.939 kilometers, to be exact: http://worlds-highest-website.com/

Answer 8

1. It's a browser / memory / os architecture issue.
2. Measuring it in anything but pixels won't be very useful unless you are referring to the size of a printed webpage on a specific paper size, orientation and scale. Screens have different sizes and DPI's.