63 characters

No they do not.

I don't think that they count the www either.

Great,

That nice long descriptive 57 character domain name will be perfect then for those directory submissions :).

The http: does not count. However, the technical limit on a domain name looks to be 255 characters, but each individual part separated by periods has a limit of 63 characters, at least based off what I could find among the Internet RFCs. Go to [ietf.org...] to find the RFCs. If I read this right, you could use [[i]60charactersubdomain[...] These excerpts come from RFC1034:

To simplify implementations, the total number of octets that represent a
domain name (i.e., the sum of all label octets and label lengths) is
limited to 255.

The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names. They must
start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior
characters only letters, digits, and hyphen. There are also some
restrictions on the length. Labels must be 63 characters or less.

I think one of the biggest limitations of the 63 character domain names is that some versions of netscape can only handle 59 characters.....

Realize that all RFCs are the spec. Software gets written to the spec. Software frequently has bugs when you get to boundary conditions. So if you try the domain that I mentioned above, it might work. But each machine it passes through may have a bug where it doesn't pass through. You could lose access half the world's machines if that bug does exist.

Netscape has so many bugs compared to the IETF and W3C specs, that you really have to try things to see if they will work in specific versions of Netscape.