Re:Never use a URL shortening service – even if you own it
by anonymouskimmer on Sunday February 19, 2023 @12:43PM
(#34859868)
This sounds like an idea for an archive.org or an archive.is browser, or plugin.
It could be compromised, maybe, by encrypting a particular date at the end of the URL. In order to point to an earlier link that the user thinks is the current link.
Re:Never use a URL shortening service – even if you own it
by jeroenhd on Sunday February 19, 2023 @12:58PM
(#34860029)
That would break most websites that switch hosts or use DNS based cloud load balancing.
Embedding the date in the URL would be great for an archive.org extension but it would be practically useless for preventing broken links.
Re:Never use a URL shortening service – even if you own it
by Salgat on Sunday February 19, 2023 @03:13PM
(#34861348)
The vast majority of uses for this would be to redirect you to the proper domain, which doesn't even need to touch any of your existing tech, since you could use a cloud service to handle the redirect portion.
Re:Never use a URL shortening service – even if you own it
by kapep on Sunday February 19, 2023 @01:04PM
(#34860092)
A subdomain like 2002.gu.com would work without introducing changes to URL specifications, with the domain registrar giving control of that subdomain to the owner of that year. But its such a niche case and also domains are probably sold because the old service is being shut down, so it would not work in most cases.
I think an external service like archive.org that also captures redirects, so it can list all shortened URLs for a page, would be the better solution.
Re:Never use a URL shortening service – even if you own it
by georgeg23 on Sunday February 19, 2023 @01:35PM
(#34860405)
That effectively is the existing archive.org...
https:// web.archive.org/web/[date]/[full url]
Re:Never use a URL shortening service – even if you own it
by ttepasse on Sunday February 19, 2023 @04:31PM
(#34862063)
I remembered that Tim Berners-Lee did write about a similar idea back in 2000 – introducing a date coded domain hierarchy:
Re:Never use a URL shortening service – even if you own it
by crazygringo on Sunday February 19, 2023 @07:12PM
(#34863346)
Son of a gun. I've never felt in more esteemed company. I figured I couldn't have been the only one to think of it. Thanks so much for the link, I never would have found that on my own!
In other words, if you type something like gu.com[2002]/rest/of/url then it should continue to resolve whatever IP address is chosen by the person who owned it in 2002. (And the IP can be updated by that owner for the rest of time.)
For end users it wouldn't matter -- putting gu.com into the browser bar always resolves to whoever owns it today.
But anytime you embedded a link into a webpage, best practice would be to append today's year (or date) to the domain in the URL. Or if you added a meta tag to the page for when the page's content was created, all links therein would default to pointing to a domain on that date.
This way, change of ownership of domain would never affect existing links.
Obviously it doesn't solve all the problems -- the historical owner still has to be maintaining the site and serving the content. But as domain names get repurposed for rebranding and financial reasons, it means existing links could still work.