[bgilroy26]

To save the url length, why not hash all possible states and have the value of the variable in the query string refer to that?

[poncho_romero]

This is a viable solution, but as the article mentions, you lose intent and readability (e.g. seeing a query parameter for “product=laptop” vs. “state=XBE4eHgU”). And in general, it’s unlikely you’ll run into issues with URL length. Two to eight thousand characters is a lot!

[threetonesun]

I remember bouncing into this limit once in a project because we wanted to make a deeply customized interface shareable without a backend, and while on the site itself we didn't hit a URL limit, when someone shared it via some email clients it added it's own tracking redirect onto the URL which caused it to hit the limit and break.

[linked_list]

Because a hash is by definition a one-way mapping, so then you'd have to keep a map of the reverse mapping hash -> state, which obviously gets impractical with state such as page index or search terms. Better just make two-way "compression" mapping

[yreg]

They probably have meant something like base64 encode

[cyptus]

and where is the hash mapped back again?