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

From: Aleksey Gurtovoy (agurtovoy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-07-22 01:11:41

Aaron W. LaFramboise writes:
> Miro Jurisic wrote:
>> 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. 
>
> To add another example of existing practice, in some forums where
> hypertext links are used, it is considered impolite to post a clickable
> URL without at least mentioning in plaintext the domain name that it
> refers to. 

Sounds like a drastic practice on empty grounds. Do you *really* care
whether the link takes you to www.boost.org/regression-logs/something
or www.meta-comm.com/engineering/something? Why?

> I don't know how much information a domain name adds, but I
> think a lot of people, myself included, don't like clicking on blind
> links.

Can you cite a single example of the Boost posting that contains a
link that you didn't follow because you were afraid/didn't know where
it'd take you in terms of the domain?

>
> Also, how long do tinyurls last? 

They never expire. Of course there is always a chance that the service
will die and the domain will be acquired by somebody with entirely
different goals, but then there is very little in this world that is
truly permanent.

> A year from now, when someone is
> searching the archives, will they still be able to follow a tinyurl?
> Three years from now?

The *original* URLs, especially the ones we are using tinyurls for,
usually don't last/become uninteresting in a fraction of that period
of time.

-- 
Aleksey Gurtovoy
MetaCommunications Engineering