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Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't all of those links become useless when the domain name shortener goes down for any reason?
by silentbicycle 18y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't all of those links become useless when the domain name shortener goes down for any reason?
- jnorthrop 18y agoYes, they would be useless.
- Semiapies 18y agoYup. They also become useless when the link points to a site on a server that has gone down for any reason - or that just throws a 404 back to you.
- silentbicycle 18y agoWell, right, but the shortener is adding another layer of unreliability into the transaction.
- Semiapies 18y agoIt does add another party to the transaction, but the question is which is more likely to fail. I've made many TinyURL links over the years, and while TinyURL is (and those links are) still around, quite a few of them point to pages that no longer exist. My suspicion is that the very sites that tend to produce absurdly long, semantically unhelpful URIs - the ones people want to shorten - are the sorts of sites often not designed around guaranteeing the permanence of an URI. Smaller news-media sites are a good example of both behaviors.
- silentbicycle 18y agoI suspect you're right, but...something about the arrangement makes my inner archivist/historian cringe.
- Semiapies 18y agoOh, in theory you're absolutely right. And in the long run, CMSs with long, obtuse, and volatile URLs will (one hopes) fade into obscurity. Practice is just lagging at the moment, giving the more stable shorteners the edge.