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

From: Rob Stewart (stewart_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-07-21 12:51:16

From: Walter Landry <wlandry_at_[hidden]>
> Miro Jurisic <macdev_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> > 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.
> > 
> > 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. 

They also solve real problems.

> I'd like to add that, of the half-dozen free/open software lists I
> read, boost is the only list that uses tinyurl's.  Making boost more
> or less dependent on tinyurl seems unnecessary.  In addition, someone

As has been illustrated already in this thread, the use of
TinyURL is not unnecessary.

> who is not mark may post a url like
> 
>   http://foo.com/~mark/new_algorithm.pdf
> 
> Later mark (not the original poster) moves their site to mark.com, so
> the site moves to
> 
>   http://mark.com/new_algorithm.pdf
> 
> With tinyurl's, it is much harder or impossible to find the new page.

For this and the OP's reasons, may I suggest that all links be
done both ways?  The long one could be put in a footnote, as
suggested previously, but with both URLs, you get the best of
both worlds.  (The long URL may well get munged, but the
information it conveys remains and the TinyURL should be
unaffected by quoting.)

-- 
Rob Stewart                           stewart_at_[hidden]
Software Engineer                     http://www.sig.com
Susquehanna International Group, LLP  using std::disclaimer;