Re: emergency URL repair

Thanks to Nick for his suggestion which is a new one on me but looks
useful.

In this case it wasn't a query that was making the URL long, but what
looks like arbitrary file and folder naming. This led to a URL longer than
72 chars which was then chopped into unusable pieces by a variety of mail
clients.

I believe these names are important enough - the interfaces to
information - that people should think about the usability of the names,
or better still they have guidelines to follow. (I'm sure an information
architect ought to leap in at this point and say this more persuasively)

Deconstructing the name - which remember was for a document that a lot of
people would want to read and not all of them might come, like me, from
the BBC site through a simple link (actually probably most of them did!)

http://www.dfes.gov.uk/highereducation/
ok I can live with this, although most people would know what HE was - one
of a fairly small range of top level activities at DFES

hestrategy/
- well what other strategy would expect here? And wouldn't strategy be
better in the filename - since that is what people will save onto their
desktops

pdfs/
I can live without URLs that repeat the file format in the folder name
that

higher_education_exec_summ.pdf
At least it's only 30 characters so I suppose Macs could read it, but
given that some words are already shortened...

So why not go for something like
htt......ww.dfes.gov.uk/he/he_strategy_execsum.pdf
(dots to avoid a fake link being created!!!!)

..and hopefully Xristine's research team wouldn't find that too cryptic!
Tom

On Fri, 24 Jan 2003 15:51:05 +0000, Simon Grant <[email protected]> wrote:

>At 09:29 2003-01-23, Michael Andrews wrote:
>>Nick Gassman mentions
>> >
>> > find out how to do that at
>> > http://www.makeashorterlink.com
>> >
>>I have found overly long URLs a growing headache.
>
>Am I right in assuming that long URLs are almost
>invariably ones with query strings at the end?
>As well as makeashorterlink and similar services,
>if getting into the middle of an interactive web
>site is important, anyone with a web site can
>easily enough create a link on that web page,
>and ensure that *their* page has a short link,
>as well as explanation of the context of, and
>reason for, the destination, which, surely, will
>normally be helpful for a reader, won't it?
>
>Since there isn't a solution that involves no
>extra work, it would be kind of the person
>recommending the link to do that extra, for
>the benefit of many others.

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