28 ms·

I confess to knowing very little about the limitations of URLs so perhaps this is s dumb question: why not go all the way down to the shortest possible? Can the

I confess to knowing very little about the limitations of URLs so perhaps this is s dumb question: why not go all the way down to the shortest possible? Can they just use the minimum unique string of characters? For example http://xyz7g http://xyz7g. What are the limits?

there 17y ago
well you have to have a valid domain name, and xyz7g is not one.
- figital 17y ago
  twitter could have easily implemented some kind of even shorter system by using some kind of rarely-used hash tag character like this: Check out this link : ±xyz7g Which would be auto-parsed to http://bit.ly/xyz7g http://bit.ly/xyz7g. That would save 13 characters.
AndrewDucker 17y ago
You need a domain name, a period, a top level domain, a slash and then an address at that domain. The shortest top level domains are the country ones - which are two characters long. The shortest domain name on top of that would be one character. So http://j.mp/Whatever http://j.mp/Whatever is in fact the shortest you can get.
- thorax 17y ago
  Note that silly services like ours ( http://tinyarro.ws http://tinyarro.ws ) further compress the character length by using unicode after the / so the URLs never grow beyond 3 characters (and can do 2 characters for a very long time).
  - jballanc 17y ago
    Last time I checked, even though the web front end counts characters, the Twitter back end counts bytes (as does, I believe, SMS). So unicode doesn't actually save anything (for twitter).
    - thorax 17y ago
      Conveniently, it does save characters on the website at entry time as their site only checks by character count. Also their backend via website doesn't validate by bytes either. Their API has fluctuated from checking bytes and characters over time-- I think right now it checks bytes. SMS does it by bytes.
      - blasdel 17y ago
        Their API has also done both simultaneously at various times, mogrifying tweets as they transition between queues/memcache. SMS doesn't actually use bytes natively -- it's 160 7-bit characters packed into 140 bytes. As is their way, Twitter fucks this up: they use the 20 spare characters for the "username: " prefix, but limit usernames to 15 characters -- 3 are completely wasted! Why not allow usernames to be 18 characters? They've historically fucked up plenty of other SMS encoding details like sending & escaped as & and murdering unicode in weird ways -- always truncating the message at an arbitrary tier instead of validating/refusing it up front.
- bhousel 17y ago
  Now if only we could get rid of that troublesome http:// http://
- modeless 17y ago
  It's technically possible to put a site on a top level domain. Now that ICANN has started allowing the purchase of TLDs we will soon be going to http://google http://google and we'll probably see a URL shortener at http://l http://l
akd 17y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System#Parts_of_a_domain_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System#Parts_of_a_d...

there 17y ago

well you have to have a valid domain name, and xyz7g is not one.

figital 17y ago
twitter could have easily implemented some kind of even shorter system by using some kind of rarely-used hash tag character like this: Check out this link : ±xyz7g Which would be auto-parsed to http://bit.ly/xyz7g http://bit.ly/xyz7g. That would save 13 characters.

AndrewDucker 17y ago

You need a domain name, a period, a top level domain, a slash and then an address at that domain. The shortest top level domains are the country ones - which are two characters long. The shortest domain name on top of that would be one character. So http://j.mp/Whatever http://j.mp/Whatever is in fact the shortest you can get.

thorax 17y ago
Note that silly services like ours ( http://tinyarro.ws http://tinyarro.ws ) further compress the character length by using unicode after the / so the URLs never grow beyond 3 characters (and can do 2 characters for a very long time).
- jballanc 17y ago
  Last time I checked, even though the web front end counts characters, the Twitter back end counts bytes (as does, I believe, SMS). So unicode doesn't actually save anything (for twitter).
  - thorax 17y ago
    Conveniently, it does save characters on the website at entry time as their site only checks by character count. Also their backend via website doesn't validate by bytes either. Their API has fluctuated from checking bytes and characters over time-- I think right now it checks bytes. SMS does it by bytes.
    - blasdel 17y ago
      Their API has also done both simultaneously at various times, mogrifying tweets as they transition between queues/memcache. SMS doesn't actually use bytes natively -- it's 160 7-bit characters packed into 140 bytes. As is their way, Twitter fucks this up: they use the 20 spare characters for the "username: " prefix, but limit usernames to 15 characters -- 3 are completely wasted! Why not allow usernames to be 18 characters? They've historically fucked up plenty of other SMS encoding details like sending & escaped as & and murdering unicode in weird ways -- always truncating the message at an arbitrary tier instead of validating/refusing it up front.
bhousel 17y ago
Now if only we could get rid of that troublesome http:// http://
modeless 17y ago
It's technically possible to put a site on a top level domain. Now that ICANN has started allowing the purchase of TLDs we will soon be going to http://google http://google and we'll probably see a URL shortener at http://l http://l

akd 17y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System#Parts_of_a_domain_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System#Parts_of_a_d...