keith said:
>   I did get your point and they due have there merit,
>   yet no more than any other filenaming convention
>   where you overly compress the names.

what do you mean by "overly compress the names"?
what would a "noncompressed" filename look like?


>   I will not either go into how flawed they are.

...because you have no arguments of substance...


>   If you want telling filenames use them.

again, what does this _mean_?


>   We are not living in a DOS world
>   where we are limited to 8 characters.

the history of the u.r.l. in terms of its length,
is rather interesting.  everybody started with
an ethic that they should be short and punchy.
not just for convenience, but memorability too.

gradually the u.r.l. began accumulating length,
as websites got more extensive and files were
segmented into subdirectories for convenience.

then google started giving juice for content words
in the u.r.l., and the length zoomed ridiculously, as
everyone employed long names for s.e.o. purposes.

things got so ludicrous that we had the emergence
of u.r.l. "shorteners", web services that promised to
end the scourge of a long u.r.l. by providing a much
shorter one they maintained which rerouted people
to the longer original, _plus_ furnished some stats,
so you knew where the clicks were coming from, etc.

what happened then was that twitter hit, and hit big.

all of a sudden, people faced a 140-character limit.
they didn't want to "waste" a substantial percentage
of that limit every time they wanted to send a u.r.l.,
so the demand for shortener services skyrocketed...

so before we could turn around, there were dozens
such services, and not just 2 or 3 (bit.ly and tinyurl),
and things got messy.  first, the shortened u.r.l. is
a pain in the ass for many people, because tweeters
will often provide different shortened versions for
the same long u.r.l., but your browser doesn't show
them as already-visited links (since technically they
_are_ different links, and your browser doesn't know
that they all point to the same eventual destination).

second, shortener services make the u.r.l. "brittle"...
if the shortener service breaks down, so does their
"rerouting" ability which points to the ultimate site,
causing all those links to break for no good reason.

as startups, with very little chance of "making it",
the original shorteners had frequent down-time,
so the problem was readily apparent, even then...

but as more and more of these services started up
-- hoping to hit the lottery by being "blessed" by
twitter or google or anyone who would buy them
for a boatload of money -- it was more and more
clear that most of these services _would_fail_, and
take all their short links with them when they did.

and sure enough, then they did start closing down.

and they continue to have cutbacks, to this very day.
one of them -- http://tr.im/ -- just announced that
it is no longer accepting u.r.l. shortening requests...
luckily, they're still honoring their current redirects;
but what happens when they go completely under?

well, we're lucky once again, because google has
come to the rescue.  they have ensured that they
will support a service designed to honor redirects
for any shortener service that goes out of business.

it makes sense, since they have a large degree of
responsibility for this problem in the first place,
since they give extra google juice to a long u.r.l.

thankfully, though, the shortener services made us
admit to ourselves that the long u.r.l. is a problem,
bringing us to the current stage of u.r.l. history,
where we are once again embracing the short u.r.l.

many people are now voluntarily cutting back on the
use of the long u.r.l.; google could help this effort
by reversing its policy to give juice to the long u.r.l.

because a short and clear u.r.l. is a better u.r.l.

because people _do_ have to occasionally type in
a u.r.l., and can't just do a simple copy-and-paste.

because people often include u.r.l. in listserve posts,
where there is an imposed length on the lines, and
u.r.l. get printed in p-books, with limited line-length.

because people tweet u.r.l.

because people dislike the brittle shortened u.r.l.

so that's why i think my 5-letter prefix works just fine.


>   Proog given that your naming convention is flawed
>   and so now you can change it !!

huh?  what?  i guess you better run that by me again.

no, on second thought, never mind.  this is a great
example about here discussion here is one big waste.

i don't think you're _trying_ to sidetrack the dialog,
keith, so i'm not going to scold you, but just tell you
that you need to keep things moving _forward_, ok?

-bowerbird