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Can rev="canonical" Replace URL-Shortening Services?
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."
I didn't understand a single word of the submission, and I used to teach Web design. Is it too much to ask submitters to define terms they use?
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Yes, TinyURL hasn't killed anyone. BUT... any attempt to fix this is entirely missing the point anyway. From the article:
If they fix twitter to support links with proper labels or tag contents --- Oh, I don't know, like HTML has supported from the very beginning --- then there wouldn't be a problem.
Don't work around the bugs, fix the bugs. Links are designed for machines, the higher-level marked up text is for people.
There's all this talk of URL shortening services - whether third-party, or in-house implementation.
The question here is this: Why are the URLs so long to begin with?
Why does it have to be:
http://shiflett.org/blog/2009/apr/save-the-internet-with-rev-canonical
A full title in the URL is, IMHO, a very inefficient idea. The excuses I've heard are:
Search Engine Optimizations (better performance when keywords are in the URL)
Okay, I can't argue that some search engines do stuff like that. But shouldn't the TITLE or META tags have more bearing on this than how ridiculously long the URL is?
"The URL has meaning, so you know what you're clicking", Context, etc.
I suppose that when I see a URL like
http://shiflett.org/blog/2009/apr/save-the-internet-with-rev-canonical
as opposed to something like
http://example.org/blog/526
I would have a slightly better idea of the article's content before clicking on it. But then again, I can't really say that I've decided against clicking on a link just because of the link URL. I would, instead, decide whether I'd want to visit the link by its link text/description.
So <a href="http://example.org/blog/526">blog on link shortening</a> would still have the same effect on me as a long URL IMO. If it were bookmarked, the same rules would apply.
Hell, if I were handed an obfuscated shortened URL without context, I'd know even less of what I was getting myself into.
I think the proper solution is to just stop making ridiculously long URLs to begin with, so we don't have to rely on obfuscation/hashing/shortening to accommodate services that have character limit restrictions. And we'd save bandwidth too, apparently. Win-win?
I'd also like to propose rel="evil" (for shock URLs and Microsoft) rel="nsfw" and rel="rickroll".
LOL! Only in America, the free market bastion of the world, do you have to pay for incoming texts.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
All this short URL stuff sounds like some phishing scam if you ask me. Short cryptic URLs obviously exist to make me transpose a couple of letters or numbers and end up at some fake bank site. No, give me large detailed URLs so I can see those dead giveaways like pid=poor_sucker&sid=steal_credit_card_info !
Short URLs indeed... no thank you Nigerian scammers... I won't be transferring any large sums today!
On a serious note, why is this news exactly?
And even 140 bytes is not the limit, since you can use multipart SMS to send longer messages transparently. Though I suppose that might be undesirable on US carriers that double-dip by charging to receive as well as to send.
It's a very mildly useful feature, but it's unnecessary bloat.
First and foremost: It's extra strain on (my) servers. Let's say this becomes an accepted standard and we start having every blogging/forum/comment system doing these lookups to find a smaller url. This means that any time a document on one of my servers is linked to, there's going to be at least one request sent for it so your system can check if a shorter url has been specified. So, now I'm serving up extra data for a feature I won't likely use, and your server has to parse the page to find the data it's looking for. Better hope my server is sending the proper headers and data...
Then we have the issue of bad urls in the link tag. We'll have the same problem that the current solution has, except I've still got the document telling you that the bad short url is good. Should your system assume my document is wrong and permanently ignore the short url? Should it check again later? Or should it even check the referenced url at all? What if I specify a completely different site/document? Malware sites could hide in plain sight when victims try to link to the offending page on some support forum, only to have the url turned into "http://www.google.com/search?q=rainbows" for everyone else.
In any event, I really don't see what the real need for this new "feature" is. The only argument I've seen for this is it allows content owners to provide a short url because their excessively descriptive long urls are exactly that: too goddamn long. Look, if you think your urls are too hard or too long for people to remember, then shorten them up. If you'd rather setup some goofy aliasing system, then do it. Why do you need some "standard" to do so? What's wrong with putting "LINK TO THIS ARTICLE: http://www.mydomain.com/article" on the page itself? Users don't get any advantages out of automating the url shortening process, and sites like twitter which require small urls are very very special cases. So... why bother?
Oh, and for what it's worth: It's pretty much common sense that the services like tinyurl aren't meant to permanently link to a site. Anyone who thinks otherwise is probably illiterate.
...why?
Really, I have no idea what the point is. Here's a TFA URL:
http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners.html
Here's what yours might look like:
http://joshua.schachter.org/89dfaf0834055017af95b8cbb8b440819c3db49a
Congratulations, it's longer. What's the gain?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!