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Posted by wxw 6 hours ago

Zohran and the Short Link(iamwillwang.com)
150 points | 46 commentspage 2
GauntletWizard 5 hours ago|
The problem with these short pithy urls is that their lifetime is limited - there's only so many initiative names and they're going to collide and be removed and replaced.

Cool uris don't change[1]. Short, readable uris are great but they should be merely redirecs, and the mapping should be version controlled and exposed to the public as an immutable history.

[1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

inigyou 32 minutes ago||
The internet isn't an append-only archive. It changes quite frequently in fact. Sorry dawg.
bastawhiz 2 hours ago|||
The public doesn't need an immutable history of URLs, they need URLs they can freaking type. When you've got pages people actually care to go to, then you can create your museum of URLs.
schrodinger 2 hours ago|||
Easily solved by adding an interstitial whenever a URI becomes replaced and is therefore no longer immutable, and showing the history of what it used to point to as well (in case you're coming along from an old link). By default, after 5 seconds, it could redirect to the current destination.
pavo-etc 5 hours ago|||
Luckily these are merely redirects!
markdown 4 hours ago|||
Brings to mind this: https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/1971618033115550180
stonogo 4 hours ago||
The lifetime of the programs they link to is also limited. There's no earthly reason, when running a website in 2026, to care what Tim Berners-Lee thought about the aesthetics and purposes of URLs in 1998. It's a nice nostalgia session, but "cool urls don't change" is ironically short-sighted and has lead to well-meaning dolts embedding GUIDs and other such constructs into them. The entire concept was posited prior to the advent of on-screen phone keyboards, which make typing long heavily-punctuated urls a pain in the ass. There are a thousand reasons to salute this document and let it recede into the mists of time.

A municipal website should be useful to the citizens who want to use it. This is a great example of doing something useful with the web.

slopinthebag 5 hours ago||
This seems so amateur hour. The way the links work in this post are broken on mobile, and the first one I managed to make work was full of trivial grammatical errors.
bakies 5 hours ago|
Works on my machine. Didn't see any grammar errors.
slopinthebag 4 hours ago||
[flagged]
anigbrowl 4 hours ago|||
You didn't even specify which link had the errors; 'the first one I managed to make work' is something known only to you. Complaining about a problem while not providing any hints on how to reproduce it is not a great way to win friends and influence people.
bix6 4 hours ago|||
Tap and tap again. Works for me. Also not seeing grammar errors…
jimmydoe 5 hours ago||
does it matter?

big tech has long canceled url on phones.

api 5 hours ago||
I can type a URL on today's iPhone just fine.
WarmWash 4 hours ago|
I'm not a huge fan of Zohran, but man, I will admit that it is so refreshing to have a leader that isn't senile and is actually in touch.
spiderfarmer 1 hour ago|
Just admit you’re a fan. No shame in that.