shorturl auto-discoverysince: 4/1/2009
Short URL auto-discovery is a simple way to link a long URL with a short URL. The following code should be placed in the <head> section of the HTML page.
<link rel="shorturl" href="http://short.com/1234" />
or add the following to the HTTP Headers of the page
Link: <http://short.com/1234>; rel=shorturl
In most real-world situations, the short URL then redirects with an HTTP code 301 to the long URL, but that behavior is not covered by this RFC.
That's it! :)
Bookmarklet
short URL - drag this link to your browser's tool bar.
Try it
Did not find a short URL
Success! Found a short URL:
sites supporting shorturl:
tumblr.com [ref]
arstechnica.com → arst.ch [ref]
snaplog.com
daringfireball.net → ✪df.ws [ref]
channel9.msdn.com → ch9.ms
scienceslides.com
and more . . .
Fork me on github
Old documentation on the Snaplog WIKI
why not use rel="alternate .... "
alternate doesn't make sense since it implies a link to same content but different format like PDF for example
why not rel="shortcut"
Shortcut in the web context is not well understood nomenclature when referring to short URLs (fine to define shortcut icons with rel="shortcut icon" though and if we wanted to follow that model (adjective noun) we'd use rel="shortcut url", but that seems excessive)
Potential legacy code breakage as suggested by http://twitter.com/soypunk/status/1509403319
Also somehow shortcut seems like the wrong wording... implies a link that will bypass something ... a splash screen, etc.
why not rel="shorter" or rel="short"
Implies shorter version of the content
why not rev="canonical"
http://revcanonical.wordpress.com/
revattribute is absent from HTML5, confusing with rel="canonical" and breaks Google's proposed definition of canonical for search purposes.
why not rel="shorturi"
Part of making a new RFC to describe a simple concept is simple naming. People know that a URL is what's in the location bar in their browser. Besides we'd never see a URI that's not an URL in this context.
why not rel="short_url"
The _ is ugly.
why not rel="shortlink"
nice, but not that much different from shorturl to warrant a change IMHO. shortaddress? shortlocation? there are tons of other options ex: tinylink? If consensus is that it's better i'll switch for sure. better to have one way to do a simple thing, but i just don't want to knee-jerk change it cause people already implemented rel="shorturl".
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