My writing has gone downhill. I wrote a long entry on URL shortening, then realized how embarrassingly bad it was written, so I deleted it. Here's the shorter version (which is still wordy - ugh).

URL shorteners are useful when your URL has tons of nasty characters that may get mangled by email clients. They are NOT useful when you're trying to fit in a URL to a Tweet - I cannot believe that Twitter somehow managed to make these URL shortener services so popular. Twitter limits to 140 because of SMS. Yet who receives URLs through SMSes that can't handle a long URL? (I cannot access URLs through my crappy phone, and I'm pretty sure iPhones had advanced client apps which could probably handle URLs fine). Twitter is NOT the internet - I really wish people wouldn't change for it.

URL shorteners as a transport mechanism ... I can accept that usage as OK. URLs on the web are not permanent (short or not) - looking back at my posts from 5 years ago, almost none of the links work. TinyURL will probably outlast most of those sites, but in theory, it is foolish to add another third party system between you and your content. But people who use TinyURLs because they think pretty URLs are too long ... come ON. I mean, do you really want to blindly click on shortened links?

I dare any of you to click this: http://tinyurl.com/yr44ke

When I implemented my Tabulas Easter Egg (always auto-expanding shortened URLs in Tabulas entries), I didn't realized I was actually improving security - Ree pointed this out to me. Don't abuse URL shorteners.

The proposed rev="canonical" solution is a great idea in theory. What it does is allow web applications to specify where they want their short URLs to be generated - ideally within the same application. That way, the web application itself controls the URL shortening service, which in theory only matters if TinyURL ever goes down. (Then you go, "Ha-ha, my site's short URLs still work" - until your whole server crashes).

Of course, any application which involves installing a Firefox plug-in is never going to get widespread adoption ... but it's still a cool technological solution, using a microformat. If anything, this shows how HTML truly is *the* ultimate markup language.