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

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.