Is 3 percent sufficiently important?

del.icio.us allows you to include notes with bookmarks and this form of annotation is quite an efficient way of collecting interesting material. You can comment and delete bookmarks so you have a sense of control. They also respect that your bookmarks belong to you and give you licensing options for your feed.

It's great but the 256 character note limit is causing me to review the whole idea. Some time ago I remember reading this advice from Philip Greenspun on size limits for user comments:

The most painful limit in Oracle is the 4000-byte maximum length of a VARCHAR. For most Web applications, this turns out to be long enough to hold 97% of user-entered data. The remaining 3% are sufficiently important that you might be unable to use VARCHAR.

In my case the 3% edge-case is more annoying as my del.icio.us firefox plugin just truncates the note without warning me. For me 3% is becoming sufficiently important.

The other feature I miss is the ability to comment on a del.icio.us link - you can feed links to a blog and some people can get comments that way but I feels like del.icio.us would be better if it could capture this comment value too. If every del.icio.us link was a separate blog entry this would work but it doesn't feel elegant as you have to modify the comment in two places now. Not every bookmark needs to appear in a regular blog - you can subscribe to a user's del.icio.us feed for that.

A combination of micro-services could probably achieve this but it's a case of 'too little butter over too much bread' syndrome and for me del.icio.us could be almost there. This is an emergent problem for del.icio.us perhaps they will just fix it. Sometimes is it good to embrace constraints but sometimes that 3 percent is sufficiently important.