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Short URL hints / autodiscovery RFC

by robspychala on 4/2/09, 5:21 PM with 7 comments

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

  • by sam_in_nyc on 4/2/09, 7:50 PM

    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.

  • by samj on 4/17/09, 12:53 PM

    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

  • by singpolyma on 4/6/09, 11:45 PM

  • by Carlfish on 4/6/09, 9:00 PM

    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?