> This led to 100+ page documents begin sent as a string in the request
How were you able to do this when the standard maximum length of a query string is 1024 bytes? I guess you could flaunt the standard as you were responsible for the backend
We had some issues because there was no real security on the API of our NLP tooling. So we put NGINX in front of it to create a from of API key auth. NGINX would deny the larger messages by default, so we had to increase some parameter so it would pass the large documents. And indeed, since this was only relevant in the backend, it didn't matter. For the front-end we built our own API that was a lot more sensible.
Except that standard...isn't. It's what some ancient version of MSIE did and that used to count for a standard in Triassic; nowadays, it gets passed around as cargo cult advice. (The relevant RFC recommends no more than 8000 bytes, sure.)
It's not cargo-cult: anyone who's worked on cross-browser front-end development probably encountered this at least once. I ran into this personally a few years back when I was trying to be too clever by half with base64-encoded queries. It's not just ancient IE that has limits - in my case it was a corporate proxy that was truncating the query (which is why only that customer was getting that bug). A year or 2 before that, I ran into the MSIE limit (must have been IE8 or 9: don't know if that counts as the Triassic period, because I don't know what we'd call the IE4-6 era)
How were you able to do this when the standard maximum length of a query string is 1024 bytes? I guess you could flaunt the standard as you were responsible for the backend