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Can rev="canonical" Replace URL-Shortening Services?

Posted by Soulskill on from the snds-lk-a-pln dept.

Chris Shiflett writes "There's a new proposal ('URL shortening that doesn't hurt the Internet') floating around for using rev="canonical" to help put a stop to the URL-shortening madness. In order to avoid the great linkrot apocalypse, we can opt to specify short URLs for our own pages, so that compliant services (adoption is still low, because the idea is pretty fresh) will use our short URLs instead of TinyURL.com (or some other third-party alternative) replacements."

4 of 354 comments (clear)

  1. Arbitrary by Senjutsu · · Score: 5, Informative

    Twitter is essentially an SMS aggregation and redistribution tool. SMS is limited to 140 character messages. I do not think you understand the meaning of the word "arbitrary".

    1. Re:Arbitrary by Jamie's+Nightmare · · Score: 5, Informative

      There's no technical reason restricting Twitter from allowing 140 rather than 160 characters, unless there's an issue I am not aware of (perhaps one or more major mobile networks are broken and only allow 140 characters rather than 140 bytes?).

      20 are reserved for the user name. The co-founder mentioned this during his interview on The Colbert nation.

      --
      "When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
  2. Re:"Great link apocolypse" WAT? by Feyr · · Score: 5, Informative

    short summary: everyone should adopt this NewTechnology(tm) because it will make twitter work better

    1. If everyone uses it
    2. if twitter implements support for it

    of course it's pretty much useless for everyone else

  3. Re:"Great link apocolypse" WAT? by ushering05401 · · Score: 5, Informative

    This story should be tagged Twitter.

    This guy seems to be focusing on the meaningful identifier aspect of URL shortening for use in a space limited context - without actually confining his suggestion to use in that sort of environment.

    He puts forth other reasons for using this method such as control over the persistence of the shortened URL, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me... and then he goes back to mentioning Twitter.