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rel="shortlink" - URL shortening that doesn't hurt the internet
- commiebob 17y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but the way I read this is on any page I own I would have to define a short url for it in the head section of the html. So with this standard no one could short link to a site I control without me going through and making up a short link for every page. In addition to that, this standard assumes that your url is somewhat short and not something like "thelongesturlintheworld.com" in which case it wouldn't help at all. Twitter needs to just make it's own URL shortening service and put an end to all this.
- catone 17y agoThey basically have. It's called bit.ly (which is the official/default URL shortener and whose servers are housed in Twitter's data center). For all intents and purposes, Bit.ly is Twitter's own URL shortener. But not every Twitter client and site uses Bit.ly (HootSuite uses ow.ly, for example, and Digg uses, well, digg.com). And, you know, not every short URL is made for Twitter. (Note: this isn't supposed to be a response to the original post, which I only skimmed.)
- profquail 17y agoCorrect, you'd need to add it to each page, but that shouldn't be a huge deal these days unless you just have tons of static html pages on your site. If your site uses some kind of templating system (Wordpress, ASP.NET Master Pages, Smarty, etc.) you should be able to dynamically add the shortened link into the document header without too much trouble.
- commiebob 17y agoI understand that it's not a huge deal, but that's not really the point. Do we really need to update every page on the internet with a short url? Just in case it gets linked on twitter or a shorter version is needed for some reason? It just seems a little ridiculous to me.
- sjs382 17y agoConsider it in a different light -- you're running your own url shortener on the same server that the content is on. This helps to avoid "linkrot" caused by unavailable/disappearing url shorteners. If this isn't a concern for you, don't provide this service. People will continue using other shorteners that are susceptible to these problems.
- simonw 17y agoThe idea isn't that every page will define its own URL. The idea is that some pages will, and things-that-shorten-URLs should then use their preference in shorter URL when linking to them. For all other pages regular URL shorteners like tinyurl and bit.ly can be used just as they are now.
- dlsspy 17y agoYou're looking at it backwards. Right now, people communicating on microblogging services end up having three things that need to be working for them to get through: 1. The µblog 2. The URL shortener 3. The original site Various URL shorteners might fall over for a bit, or any other number of stupid things. In the wordpress example, they registered wp.me so they could shorten the URLs sanely: http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2009/08/16/mattmensch.gif http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2009/08/16/m... If you support shortening, you reduce a dependency. You can still use tinyurl or bit.ly or whatever in this model, but if you don't, it'll be done for you.
- chrischen 17y agoThen why don't microblogging sites find a way to accomodate long URLs. Why do we have to start defining short (which is subjective) urls?
- dlsspy 17y agoThat's a fine suggestion, but it requires some out of band metadata. Remember, twitter is an SMS mailing list. You want to be able to send that data in a way it can be picked up from simple mechanisms like SMS messages.
- chrischen 17y agohmmm... I guess that's a good reason. But what other use is there besides SMS?
- trezor 17y agoPhones have been able to recieve SMSes longer than 140 characters for about a decade now. Limiting a service on the internet because 0.1% of the users want SMS notification on decade old phones is stupid and backwards.
- carbon8 17y agoShort URLs aren't just about twitter. URL shortening is useful in a variety of situations, and tinyurl was widely used for years before twitter came along.
- samj 17y agoIn addition to space constrained applications such as SMS (and artificially space constrained applications like Twitter) shortlinks are also required anywhere humans are required to remember and/or enter them - that is, when they are printed, recited over radio or displayed on televisions. This is a very important use case that people often ignore. Sam
- SingAlong 17y agoDoesn't this interfere/clash with the XFN specs? Because, XFN uses rel attribute of links to define relationships.
- dlsspy 17y agoI think it fits fine: This attribute describes the relationship from the current document to the anchor specified by the href attribute. The value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types. I'd say a shorter version version of a URL represents a relationship to the current URL naturally.
- pohl 17y agoWebmasters could have been giving thoughtful consideration of the length & structure of their URLs all this time, yet they have not been doing so. A voluntary system like this slightly better, but couldn't it be ignored just as easily?
- omouse 17y agoWebmasters could have been giving thoughtful consideration of the length & structure of their URLs all this time, yet they have not been doing so. They don't do it because it would negatively affect their search ranking.
- tlrobinson 17y agoOr how about Twitter just not count URLs against the length and be done with it. For SMS, Twitter could just append a very short URL pointing to the actual tweet on their site, where you'll be able to see the URLs.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- JimmyL 17y agoOne of my pet peeves about Twitter is that conceptually, it hasn't embraced the fact that most of its users don't Tweet by SMS. I'm all about using a restricted message format to encourage spontaneity and focus the message, but if I want to @reference more than like three people I have very little room for what I want to say - and if I have a URL as well, I have almost none. Keep the system as-is for SMS-based tweets, but for the rest of us don't count @names or URLs in the message length.
- derefr 17y agoSo what happens to the "unrestricted" tweets when they're received over SMS?
- riffic 17y agoTwitter should treat urls, @reply, #hashtags, geographical descripters, etc as a separate metadata field outside of the message.
- sjs382 17y agoThis is already done on some sites using rel="canonical" and rev="canonical". please don't create a competing standard. A site as large as Flickr already uses this standard. Check the page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickmatte/3828709208/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickmatte/3828709208/ It contains both: - <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickmatte/3828709208/ /> - <link rev="canonical" type="text/html" href="http://flic.kr/p/6Qk8RJ > Each one has a specific purpose. You can read more at: - http://simonwillison.net/2009/Apr/11/revcanonical/ - http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.urls.html#short
- akirk 17y agoWell, it is controversial whether rev="canonical" is the right thing to be used. Furthermore the rev attribute has been removed from HTML5. See http://annevankesteren.nl/2009/04/rev-canonical http://annevankesteren.nl/2009/04/rev-canonical for some details.
- sjs382 17y agoA rebuttal: http://erikvold.com/blog/index.cfm/2009/4/21/rev_canonical_good http://erikvold.com/blog/index.cfm/2009/4/21/rev_canonical_g... I've disagreed with the rev attribute being removed from html5 since I read about it. The draft isn't final though, so time will tell... But back to html4... Google, Yahoo and MS all support (or have announced support for) rev="canonical". The only "standards" that matter are the ones that are used. :)
- jacquesm 17y ago> the only "standards" that matter are the ones that are used Right, like upper case html tags and the iframe tag... It's a difficult time for the web, and real standards are hard to come by. The 'standards that matter are the ones that are used' attitude is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place (Microsoft up front with their 'extensions'). I'm all for waiting for the dust to settle and then refactoring using whatever the standards body decides, even if that would be against my personal preference. Using something on purpose to try to subvert the process to me smacks of driving on the left hand side when the standard behaviour is to drive on the right. It creates a lot of trouble for no good reason other than to prove that 'you can'. Of course you can. But do you really want to aggravate others just to show that you can ? There is plenty of stuff in the current html standard that goes against my personal preference but I won't let that get in the way of at least trying to comply.
- scythe 17y agoI liked the idea behind http://twi.bz/ http://twi.bz/, which at least shows the domain name behind the link. It doesn't make for quite as short links as tr.im &c though.
- trezor 17y agoI was about to make a post about how I wanted twitter dead to end all this useless noise about URL shorteners. Then I realized that the reason there is noise here is that some people actually seem to think they have something to offer the world which the real URL wouldn't do. Can someone who are actually willing to defend these things explain to me why you consider a short URL more useful than the original? What motivation you have for adding third parties to what could be a standard hyperlink?
- sjs382 17y agoIf it's short enough, it can be easily read over the phone. If similar looking characters are removed (1 or I; 0 or O), they can be easily noted in a notebook without confusion. These are just two alternate uses...
- ubernostrum 17y agoThe two most common uses I've seen are: 1. Huge unwieldy URLs like the ones you get from Google Maps, which may get mangled by email clients. 2. Easy-to-type URLs to put in slides for presentations, since people in the audience can't click on the things you're showing them.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]