Open standards for shortening URLs rather than private Hash Tables of random shortlinks is a great idea. Being open source and predictable it would not be nece

Open standards for shortening URLs rather than private Hash Tables of random shortlinks is a great idea. Being open source and predictable it would not be necessary to specify any particular shortening service so that part of the URL is extraneous. Of course there would need to be some chars to refer to which particular open standard shortening encoder was used, still would be shorter than the oringal url for this post. They could be reliably decoded, preventing the short link rot problem. As the user could decode the URL themselves it also allows one to preview short link's URLs which can be reassuring and better security and prevent bait and switch shortlink destination changing tactics.