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.
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 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. Cheers, Walter Landry wlandry@ucsd.edu