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> Advocating for "proper link formatting or better content presentation" reflects the fact that you've never had to dig deep into the complex SEO, user, customization, and other general business requirements that arise when running a CMS. Erm. I don't think you understand what I meant. I meant if a URL is too long to fit within a block of text in your medium, enable hyperlinking it with short, descriptive link text the way just about any media other than twitter or plain text (or HN markdown, but I digress) allows. Have we already regressed from the concept of the well-made hyperlink? I appreciate that designing URL structure for a site can be difficult. I don't think it's as hard as you make it out to be, because just about any free CMS package will take care of SEO'd URLs for you and set up redirects even if you change your content. Hell, you can customize all of this in Wordpress without touching code. But that's an orthogonal problem, and shortened URLs neither contribute to SEO nor constitute a viable long-term URL structure for any site. > Short urls are valuable because they allow people an ability to simplify the increasingly long urls for use in many different mediums without the worry of breaking or losing portions of the url. This is what I don't understand. OK, sure, URLs get long, but they could be long before we started putting keywords in them, that's not new. Besides email or twitter, what media are you possibly talking about where I'm dropping bits of a URL on the floor? And if bad email clients can't linkify long URLs properly and twitter won't allow proper link formatting, why are we just rolling over and enabling their problems? >Twitters 140 characters is part of what defines them. There will always be short message mediums, ... They could and should make an exception for URLs. Imagine tweeting: URL shortener controversy all over again!
[Read it on HN|http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2734728]
and the URL portion and formatting doesn't count toward the limit, only the link text part. Visually, that's only 55 characters worth of information, and that's how the limit should be formulated. You can't tell me that http://bit.ly/blsa23848 is more informative or contributes meaningfully to Twitter's character limit by virtue of it being shorter than my formatted link with link text. In fact, it's less informative, and obscures the link's true destination without deshortening (and as the OP shows, deshortening is fallible). |