Re: [boost] What is it with boost and tinyurl?

From: Aleksey Gurtovoy (agurtovoy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-07-21 03:28:58

Miro Jurisic writes:
> It seems to me that boost developers are particularly enamored with tinyurl. 
> While I agree that there are cases when tinyurl is a good thing, I can't but 
> think that in many cases where it's used on boost lists it does more harm than 
> good.

FWIW, I myself never experienced the inconveniences you describe below. 

> Tinyurl (and similar services) discard valuable information from the URL. I 
> often use information in the URL itself to judge whether the topic being 
> discussed is of interest to me. 
>
> Example:
>
> Useless:
>
> <http://tinyurl.com/4ghk7>
>
> Useful:
>
> <http://boost.sourceforge.net/regression-logs/cs-win32_metacomm/developer/program
> _options.html>
>
> ("Don't need to click if you are not interested in win32 regression of program 
> options.")

Unless you point to the particular message in which the link appeared
and at least some of us agree that the context didn't convey there the
link is going to take you (in terms of the page content), I'm for one
inclined to see this and the following examples as biased.

>
> Useless:
>
> <http://tinyurl.com/yrotd>
>
> Useful:
>
> <http://lists.boost.org/MailArchives/boost/msg61026.php>
>
> ("Herein I refer to a previous thread on this mailing list.")
>
> Both of those examples were recently posted to the mailing list, and
> in both cases there was not enough context in the surrounding text
> for me to determine what the URL was about (without having to read
> several messages in the thread).
>
> I could name at least two other reasons for why tinyurl is not a great idea: 
> first, it means that tinyurl.com can track my web access; second, if tinyurl is 
> down, I am screwed. 

The latter is the only real problem with it, IMO.

> Neither of those two is as important to me as the reason I 
> outlined above, though.
>
> Finally, URL line wrapping is a well-understood problem, with a recommended 
> practice (namely, enclosing URLs in text inside <>, as I did above) codified in 
> the current URL RFC. Every email and usenet client I am aware of does the right 
> thing with line-wrapped URLs in angle brackets.

There are plenty that don't.

-- 
Aleksey Gurtovoy
MetaCommunications Engineering