[thelist] tinyURL usage

Jackson Yee jyee at vt.edu
Mon Feb 24 19:30:01 CST 2003


"Kevin Cannon" <p+evolt at redbrick.dcu.ie> wrote in message
news:20030224193424.B17055 at prodigy.Redbrick.DCU.IE...
> I kind think tinyURL and things of their ILK are actually a bad idea.
>
> I find 5 years time it goes bust or starts using ads then all the
hyperlinks
> in mailing list archives etc... will be lost, and searching archives won't
be
> much use.
>
> I understand the idea in principle, but I think encouraging webmasters to
> create shorter URL it's a better idea.

I myself, along with Tim Berners-Lee, would probably agree with you on that
remark.  Still, most addresses in the web aren't typed in manually, but
clicked upon from another page or bookmarked, so it seems to me that if you
had to spend resources in only one way, making navigation from the front
page better would be much more productive than improving the URL system.

When linking technology becomes more prominent and practical, I would love
to see metadata-based web navigation rather than our current DNS/URI system.
Imagine typing into your computer "ESPN Hockey Scores" instead of
"http://sports.espn.go.com/nhl/scoreboard."  Which one would be more
intuitive?

--
Regards,
Jackson Yee
jyee at vt.edu





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