FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Organized resistance to WBI/invasive patdowns

Aug 31, 2010, 10:38 am

#165

pmocek

Join Date: Apr 2008

Location: USA

Posts: 1,439

Please don't use URL shorteners unless necessary

Quote:

Originally Posted by PhoenixRev

As for more content for the tri-fold, documentation of the claims. Use a URL shortening agent (like tinyurl.com) to list this link: http://www.npr.org/assets/news/2010/05/17/concern.pdf which documents concerns about the radiation from back scatter WBIs.

While such services are convenient when communicating URLs under tight constraints such as those imposed by SMS or microblogging, they obscure information from the reader (e.g., can no longer tell the URL describes a resource provided by NPR) and leave resolution of the URL (conversion of the human-readable text to a numeric machine address) up to a third party (e.g., bit.ly, tr.im, tinyurl.com, urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com, etc.) who can disable the service at will.

We put up with these "URL shortening" services due to limitations of some technology, but in general, they break the Web. Please think carefully before using them. They are generally inappropriate for print.

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