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."

Comments

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Shorten links to avoid messes like this:

[wiredog]

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?threshold=2&mode=thread&commentsort=3&sid=1196477

Solving the wrong problem

[CarpetShark]

Yes, TinyURL hasn't killed anyone. BUT... any attempt to fix this is entirely missing the point anyway. From the article:

I happen to think this URL is beautiful. :-) Unfortunately, it is sure to get mangled into some garbage URL if you try to talk about it on Twitter, because it's not very short. I really hate when that happens. What can I do?

If rev="canonical" gains momentum...

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.

Alternative Solution: Implement it Right?

[Kupo]

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?

Re:I have an easier solution:

[he-sk]

LOL! Only in America, the free market bastion of the world, do you have to pay for incoming texts.

Well, I call for long URLs

[athlon02]

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?