... a short Google URL ...
... why this matters to contributors to comp.lang.tcl, editors of Tcl-URL!, and authors of this Wiki ...
The technique: ...
2004/11/02 sheila How long does Tcl-URL! and the Tclers' Wiki require URLs to maintain accuracy? (fun tangent, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia [L1 ])
LV Sheila, there are no requirements for lifetime of URLs, since for there to be a requirement, there would need to be consequences, and one cannot force someone to keep a URL live. Some might argue that the consequence is that, if a URL becomes non-functional, it needs to be updated. Currently I've not had a lot of luck getting people to maintain activity in the Project E.L.M.O., which was formed to work on such things.
It would be lovely if people used persistent URLs (or URIs) so that such things lived for ever. Alas, that's one of the shortcomings of the web as we know it today.
sheila Perhaps requirements was the wrong word. Maybe this is better: what practices should we follow to meet the needs of the Tclers' Wiki and of Tcl-URL!? Or, what expectations should users of these services have?
The use of tinyurl and similar services depend on the assumption that browsers and newsreaders cannot handle long URLs, and will not do so in the future. Will be true five years from now? Will our archives of URLs exist five years from now? That in mind, what is the best approach for archiving URLs?
Tinyurl is ephemeral, and it obscures links. Google may be less ephemeral, but it also usually obscures links. I'd like to figure out an ideal solution, then work from that to get a comprimise with reality. So, my requirements question refers to usability requirements? What are archival requirements wrt URLs. Mine would be persistence, clear meaning to what they were meant to point to (for when the archive they point to dissappears?), etc. I bet a lot of people have already thought about these types of things -- just need to track down the info. (oh, and places that actually contain the archive or databases -- they should have usability requirements for URLs. why don't they?)
In any case, I don't want to hijack the page. e.g. I would like to see tips on how to shrink down to the minimal google URL would be nice to have on this page, aside from my tangent about the deep time of URLs. Same thing for amazon.com. I'd really like to be able to link to a book site where you can have bookdb.net/<ISBN> or other non-hash persistent ID. Not sure what the analogy would be in usenet. Message IDs?
try www.ibookdb.net/isbn/<ISBN> e.g. http://www.ibookdb.net/isbn/0385731841
2004/11/02 MAK Shortened URLs such as those from tinyurl are usually temporary. They're usually used when a person is likely to need to copy and paste the URL (such as from a text-only chat, news or email client), but not useful as links in web pages and wikis. Particularly in this wiki, surrounding a URL in brackets produces a numeric link as in the above, which avoids the aesthetic problems of long URLs in wiki pages.
2005/05/26 Rakesh Well yes, the only numeric URLs like the one TinyURL creates is just for temporary usage. But there are many.. many.. many.. redirection services there which also provides xyz.urlredirectionservice.com. And there are also sites which provides custom URLs like urlredirectionservice.com/xyz. I have used http://urlcutter.com/ , which provides custom urls, along with the numeric / random urls.
Thanks, I will find more related sites and post more info about them here. Also there is one site.. which lists major of such redirection services and also compares them. Oh yeah, I found that here is the one... http://notlong.com/links It's very useful to compare such services easily.