There is some truth that the mere possibility of persisting all this information we persist today, has convinced us that it is also valuable or will be valuable at some point in the future. We don’t save every phone conversation or SMS we send, or even every face-to-face conversation we have with a friend at the cafe, but with the Internet we seem to put things in another frame entirely.

In reality, not just short links rot. Long links also rot, pages are removed, sites disappear, domains expire, it is a part of a natural cycle. When information is really useful, there is usually an active effort to preserve it, mirror it, and make it available in different media and formats.

Short links are a bit of a sensitive subject, however, since their providers are turning into a single point of failure for linked content, and so the perceived danger of sudden significant damage has propelled the conversation about rev=”canonical” and its synonyms forward.

As I commented elsewhere, people seem mostly concerned about how to spell the attribute name and value, while I see much larger problems in general. Will short link providers harm their business by respecting rev=”canonical”? Would people know enough to install browser plugins supporting it? Will they know enough to know how to support this on their own sites?

And also, some scenarios seem not well covered by this mechanism. A rev=”canonical” link is relevant for the entire page. This means you can’t specify a short link to a fragment identifier inside that page, unless — as I was hinted by Chris Shiflett in a conversation — you append the full fragment identifier to the short link itself, thus making it a not very short link. Also links are created in advance, instead of on-demand, which creates a link “garbage” problem for service with highly dynamic URLs like Google Maps.

So, the problems are many, solutions are hard to come by. As an attempt to do something, I created this little experimental service: http://lll.jugai.com

It is essentially taking 4 short link providers and creating 4 short links with the same name pointing to the same URL on all of them. Hence adding automatic mutual “link backup” if any three of those services go down in the future. I’m not claiming this solves the problem entirely, I’m leaving this to the community to judge, but hopefully it demonstrates there is more than one way to tackle this, and I hope future discussion also covers the many alternative solutions we don’t consider right now.