From: Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>
Miro Jurisic <macdev@meeroh.org> 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@sig.com Software Engineer http://www.sig.com Susquehanna International Group, LLP using std::disclaimer;