The bas thing with existing third-party URL shorteners is that they might (and do) go out of business at any time! I'm not sure whether we need a standard for i

The bas thing with existing third-party URL shorteners is that they might (and do) go out of business at any time! I'm not sure whether we need a standard for it, but it might be a good idea to be indendent of such external services. A simple, generic way could be a hash of the original URL with a compact representation: http://example.com/some/path/to/stuff?filter1=asdf&filter2=90#positionX http://example.com/s/Wq_2 /s stands for "short" and the ID is the hash representation. If you use a-zA-Z0-9 plus some URL safe characters like _ it should be reasonably short even for large sites. The CMS or whatever software doesn't have to to implement something, because it is mostly just a generic URL shortener running on the same host.