WP-A: A New URL Shortener

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 9:53 AM, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn
<PointedEars at web.de> wrote:
> Vinicius Mesel wrote:
>
>> I'm a 16 year old Python Programmer that wanted to do something different.
>> But, like we know, ideas are quite difficult to find.
>> So I decided to develop a URL Shortener to help the Python community out
>> and share my coding knowledge, and today the project was launched with its
>> first stable version. So if you want to see the software working, go check
>> it out at: http://wp-a.co/ Or if you want to see the source code to
>> contribute and help the project: https://github.com/vmesel/WP-A.CO
>
> I find it particularly disturbing that in wpa.py:processaURL() your software
> apparently stores the original URIs in an SQL database; in the case of your
> proof-of-concept, in *your* database.  So *you* are listening in the middle
> then.  I cannot be sure because I have not thought this through, but with
> aliases for common second-level domains, and with text compression, it
> should be possible to do this without a database.

How? If you shorten URLs, you have to be able to reconstruct the long
ones. Compression can't do that to arbitrary lengths. Somewhere there
needs to be the rest of the information.

> And with the exception of Twitter-ish sites that place a limit on message
> length, there really is *no need* for shorter URIs nowadays.  (HTTP) clients
> and servers are capable of processing really long ones [1]; electronic
> communications media and related software, too [2].  And data storage space
> as well as data transmission has become exceptionally inexpensive.  A few
> less bytes there do not count.

There are many places where there are limits (hard or soft) on message
lengths. Some of us still use MUDs and 80-character line limits.
Business cards or other printed media need to be transcribed by hand.
Dictation of URLs becomes virtually impossible when they're
arbitrarily long.

> Instead, there *is* a need for *concise*, *semantic* URIs that Web (service)
> users can *easily* *remember*.  It is the duty of the original Web
> authors∕developers to make sure that there are, and I think that no kind of
> automation is going to ease or replace thoughtful path design anytime soon
> (but please, prove me wrong):

Sure...... if you control the destination server. What if you're
engaging in scholarly discussion about someone else's content? You
can't change the canonical URLs, and you can't simply copy their
content to your own server (either for licensing reasons or to
guarantee that the official version hasn't been tampered with).

So URL shorteners are invaluable tools. However, I'm not sure what
this one is that others aren't.

ChrisA