Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker) [LWN.net]

Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

Posted Apr 14, 2016 20:29 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
Parent article: Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

Heh. I've always disliked shorteners. Seems like a good reason to continue to not use them. Also fun is finding the shorteners which need JS to actually work…

to post comments

Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

Posted Apr 15, 2016 10:14 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (8 responses)

> Heh. I've always disliked shorteners.

I was going to say that! :) Yeah, they are opaque and very unhelpful when I want to quickly and efficiently determine whether I want to go there at all. You never know where you're going to land. This alone has some security implications...

Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

Posted Apr 15, 2016 11:30 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (7 responses)

Careful: you'll get shouted down by the "everybody else does it" brigade. It gets even more annoying when people use these obfuscated URLs in communications where the original URL need not be short, like normal HTML where it is the link text that gets displayed.

Sadly, 25 years on and the exotic wizardry of hypertext remains barely understood by the people whose job involves communicating with others on the Web, as their communications gradually degrade into a string of hash- and at-prefixed keywords mixed with opaque references that depend on a handful of proprietary services for their correct interpretation, making those utterances even less comprehensible when reviewed in 25 years' time.

Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

Posted Apr 15, 2016 12:55 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (6 responses)

I agree with you but CMS that generate ridiculously long and non copy-pastable URL are to blame fo the invention of shorteners.

Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

Posted Apr 15, 2016 15:02 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (3 responses)

> I agree with you but CMS that generate ridiculously long and non copy-pastable URL are to blame fo the invention of shorteners.

The reply to that is obviously:

> Sadly, 25 years on and the exotic wizardry of hypertext remains barely understood by the people whose job involves communicating with others on the Web...

If you are puking your internal data structures into the URL then you are doing something wrong, I figure. URL shorteners are just a symptom of a bigger problem.

Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

Posted Apr 26, 2016 12:10 UTC (Tue) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link] (2 responses)

> If you are puking your internal data structures into the URL

If you’re CMS puts the article "Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services" under https://example.org/Gone-In-Six-Characters-Short-URLs-Con... it is NOT because it somehow shows its innards (that’s much more the case, if the article in question is at https://lwn.net/Articles/683880/)

The reason for these verbose URLs seems to be search engine "optimisation" (newspeak for tricking). I don’t know if Google (are there other engines these SEOers and their customers care about?) still gives more weight to keywords in the URL than in the text, or if it ever did.

Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

Posted Apr 26, 2016 12:50 UTC (Tue) by itvirta (guest, #49997) [Link] (1 responses)

Including the title in the URL is actually _useful_ too, if you happen to only have the URLs saved.
It's rather annoying to pick the correct one amongst many that differ only by an opaque number.

Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

Posted Apr 26, 2016 18:04 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

The best patterns I've seen are "https://host/path/id/slug" where the slug doesn't matter (so if the link gets word-wrapped or truncated, it still resolves properly), but is still useful when searching history or whatever. But that doesn't really work for non-static websites.

Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

Posted Apr 15, 2016 15:24 UTC (Fri) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link] (1 responses)

That's a problem with the CMS, not the URL.

And every CMS I've ever used has a "friendly URL" option which basically just puts the logical location (e.g. fred.com/section/subsection/page) as the URL string.

There's nothing worse than copy-pasting an Amazon string, even and discovering a pile of unnecessary junk on the end of it.

Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

Posted Apr 25, 2016 14:18 UTC (Mon) by JFlorian (guest, #49650) [Link]

> There's nothing worse than copy-pasting an Amazon string, even and discovering a pile of unnecessary junk on the end of it.

I oft wonder if my soul is part of that unnecessary junk and if I've made some sort of deal with the devil if I don't trim it.