... a short Google URL ...
... why this matters to contributors to the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup, 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 E.L.M.O. project, which was formed to work on such things.
It would be lovely if people used persistent URLs, so that such things lived for ever. Alas, that's one of the shortcomings of the web as we know it today.
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.