

Short URL hints / autodiscovery RFC - robspychala
http://sites.google.com/a/snaplog.com/wiki/short_url_hints
Love it or hate it URL shorteners are here to stay. Here is a draft proposal for a simple spec that would allow them to play nice with sites that already have their own short URLs
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sam_in_nyc
Very interesting proposal here... though I think having the consumer do an
http request to get the "link" from HEAD is a bit too much to ask, for a few
reasons:

* It takes bandwidth

* It's (presumably) before a pageload, and is blocking... the latency to load the original URL to get the "link" gets added to the consumer's pageload time.

* Now you have to deal with "timeouts"

Ideally, "link" should be used by the browser, and not the web service. By the
way, other such auto-discovery systems are OpenSearch (first proposed by
Amazon, and is pretty widely adopted) and FavIcon.

At any rate, I think tinyurl, and bit.ly, etc, are a pretty fast and easy
solution at this point. They should improve their services by including a
"title" attribute to the link they give you, which says the URL and/or page
title it's going to.

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robspychala
thanks for the feedback!

good point about the bandwidth and timeouts.

also, browsers could definitely use the link information. Thought the idea is
for the twitter clients (and other micro-blogging tools) to not obfuscate a
URL with shorteners in the 1st place.

granted some sites will always need tinyurl.com, etc but there should be a way
for sites to specify their own short URL versions of their long URLs

also as i understand it, adding a title attribute would break the purpose of
using a URL shortener - i could see the link with title would take up more
space than the original URL in HTML code.

also thanks for the opens search and fav-icon suggestions. i will update the
RFC.

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sam_in_nyc
_also as i understand it, adding a title attribute would break the purpose of
using a URL shortener - i could see the link with title would take up more
space than the original URL in HTML code._

I always thought URL shortening was just to make the HREF short... not the
source HTML.

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samj
So is it short_url or short_uri or short-url or short-uri or "short url" or
"short uri" or shorturl or shorturi?

"shortlink (<http://code.google.com/p/shortlink/>) doesn't have any of the
disadvantages of its predecessors...

Sam

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singpolyma
<http://laughingmeme.org/2009/04/03/url-shortening-hinting/>

~~~
robspychala
[http://wiki.snaplog.com/short_url#TOC-Suggestions-from-
commu...](http://wiki.snaplog.com/short_url#TOC-Suggestions-from-community)

the rev attribute is deprecated from HTML5

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Carlfish
The spec seems to assume you are using XHTML. Maybe it should make it clear
that in HTML4 pages the self-closing tag syntax is not required?

