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 15, 2016 15:02 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker) by ballombe
Parent article: Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

> 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.

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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.