ansaurus

Question

URL Shortening that Leaves the Shortened URL in the Address Bar

Answer 1

A:

You could write a pass through script that reads the destination url, and passes the contents back. I doubt it would be robust though. I doubt any solution to this would be robust. What is the purpose of this? And what's wrong with the frame?

recursive 2009-10-13 23:52:10

@recursive: What's wrong with the frame is mentioned by the OP: it "...breaks links on the destination site (clicking one won't update the address bar)."

Asaph 2009-10-13 23:54:10

The purpose is that it's more visually pleasing to see http://goto/toms-projects in the address bar than http://some_really_long_url_with_special_characters

Horace Loeb 2009-10-14 00:10:32

@Asaph: In what sense is that any more broken than the original concept?

recursive 2009-10-14 00:50:21

@Horace Loeb Why are you worried about how visually pleasing the address bar is? It's intended to be functional. People are entirely fine with long URLs in it.

ceejayoz 2009-10-14 02:00:19

@recursive: when the site is in a frame and the address bar remains constant as the user clicks around the site, individual pages are difficult to bookmark or email links to a friend.

Asaph 2009-10-14 02:27:02

Answer 2

+1 A:

Why not just do a server side include of the appropriate file/content instead of the redirect?

Asaph 2009-10-13 23:52:13

Bad idea. What about relative URLs?

Kalmi 2009-11-03 10:46:50

@Kalmi: I think this question was edited after I posted this answer. My answer made sense for the question as it was originally posted. In any case, I just posted another answer which is to use the html `<base>` tag to preserve the correct behavior of relative urls.

Asaph 2009-11-03 11:17:39

Answer 3

+3 A:

In order to preserve the original destination of relative links within the page, you could use the base tag.

<html>
    <head>
         ...
         <base href="/original/really/long/url/" />
         ...
    </head>
    <body>
          ...
          <a href="relative-url.html">a happy relative link</a>
          ...
    </body>
</html>

Asaph 2009-11-03 11:14:46

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

URL Shortening that Leaves the Shortened URL in the Address Bar

related questions