Why do some specific web pages have addresses that contain SEVERAL dozen nonsense characters in the address bar? Even if there are quadrillions of individual web pages there are still way too many characters than necessary for them all to be unique and leave room for more.
In: Technology
The quick answer is that what seems nonsense to you, makes perfect sense to the computer. And importantly, the opposite is also true (what makes sense to you seems nonsense to the computer).
The most basic example of this is the ‘space’ character; many times, computers can only interpret it one way: as a break between objects. So what happens when your web address, which is a single object, has a space in it? Well, by default, it breaks. So instead the computer will use a ‘space seeming character’ to look like a space, but actually be something else. And when *that* shows up in a web address that you then look at, it turns into a series of % and numbers. This also happens with other symbols that the computer has trouble with ( ” marks, slashes, rare/non-english characters). So if that’s what you’re talking about, that’s your answer.
Now, if you mean the string of random letters/numbers some web pages use (using this question as an example, the ‘1c74iqz’ in the URL), it’s a way to be consistent and brief. Every time that sequence is properly used on Reddit, it will point to this page. And it’s not like every single combination before it in sequence are used up, it’s that the programmers look at how fast new pages are created, and they think ‘7 characters will last us long enough’ (e.g. a few years or decades before they need to reprogram anything). And then when a new page is created they just take a random sequence and use it.
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