#urls

This got me thinking: how often do we, as frontend engineers, overlook the URL as a state management tool? We reach for all sorts of abstractions to manage state such as global stores, contexts, and caches while ignoring one of the web’s most elegant and oldest features: the humble URL.

Bit.ly redirects as many as 8 billion of those links in a given month. To help further strengthen the reliability of its shortened URLs, Bit.ly is going right to the root of the Web's infrastructure. I wouldn't exactly say this is *strengthening* the skeleton.

Bravo!

"RevCanonical is url shortening with a twist. Instead of creating its own super short versions of links, it checks to see if the link owner has published a shortened version of the given page using HTML link element. If not, we just return the original URL. And you should bug the link owner about providing a better alternative."

"So there are clear benefits for both the service (low cost of entry, potentially easy profit) and the linker (the quick rush of popularity). But URL shorteners are bad for the rest of us.I feel that shorteners are bad for the ecosystem as a whole. But what can be done to improve the situation?"

"Note that the client doesn't get to 'know' how to construct employee URIs from employee-ids, instead it just follows links from the employee list to each employee resource."

"I’m also happy that del.icio.us uses MD5 hashes to normalize this situation." How meta is this now?