tinyurl considered harmful from Mark Baker on 2004-02-04 (www-ws-desc@w3.org from February 2004)

From: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2004 13:08:15 -0500
To: www-ws-desc@w3.org
Message-ID: <20040204130815.E16311@www.markbaker.ca>

Hi,

I just started reading through the minutes, and noticed the use of the
tinyurl service to yield smaller URIs.  There's certainly some value in
that, as it avoids the wrap-around URI-truncation problem.  But it also
introduces a dependency on a third party; should tinyurl cease to work
at some point in the future, then the minutes of these meetings become
much more difficult to understand (they're not self-describing).

I really feel that, for the purposes of maintaining anything which is
intended to persist for a sufficiently long time (as WG minutes are, I
believe), that the original URIs should be used instead of tinyurls.

Thanks.

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca

Received on Wednesday, 4 February 2004 13:08:33 UTC