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

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 2

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();

?>