Comments on: Unreadable URLs are bad

By: blork

blork — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:09:46 +0000

You got that right. Like you, I can think of a few cases where tinyurl is useful, but some folks seem to use them for all cases, which is stupid and annoying.

Human readable. Are we still having that discussion? (Sigh…) Remember Compuserve? Back in the day, they used to use numbers as email addresses. So instead of mikel@compuserve you were 4578923475@compuserve. Even in 1995 or so, there were people with those numeric email addresses.

You will note that Compuserve is no more.

By: mikel

mikel — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 04:32:34 +0000

Yeah, those database-generated URLs are pretty bad, but at least you can see what site they’re pointing to.

Best of all – URLs that make sense. THAT is the argument I’ve had countless times.

By: hugh

hugh — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 04:23:38 +0000

or rather, the miserable/long/unreadable URLs that make tinyurl so necessary and useful …are a user-hostile pain in the backside.

as it stands, tinyurl is a decent solution to a bad problem.