Possibly the ultimate URL-shortening service

[pne]

Forget the oddly-long-named makeashorterlink.com or even the fairly short xrl.us—try out http://tm./!

Depending on your browser and your DNS setup, you may even be able to leave out the dot and use http://tm/.

Comments

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

I like tinyurl.com :)

[pne.livejournal.com]

Oh, there's a whole bunch of them :)

I usually use xrl.us aka Metamark, but mostly because I know (of) the person who runs the thing, since he's also involved to some extent with Perl development.

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

Neither of those links work for me. Indeed, neither of them is a legal Internet URL.

[ladyortyger.livejournal.com]

the first one is borked, and the second brought me to xe's currency converter?!

[pne.livejournal.com]

Indeed, neither of them is a legal Internet URL.

Reference?

I've tried to dig up the specification for "an Internet URL" (I presume you mean "an HTTP URL", since different URI schemes use different syntaxes) but most merely mention that there should be a "host" component.

I'm not sure whether it's mandated anywhere that a hostname consist of more than one "label" -- and if you want to avoid tacking on the default domain (as sometimes happens for one-label names), the trailing . in "tm." should make it explicit that this is a component directly beneath the root.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Strange. The first one works for me here at work (behind a proxy); the second one works from a shell account (with the first one being translated into the second).

But XE? That's strange.

[ladyortyger.livejournal.com]

I think it's Firefox looking up what I put in (tm, obviously), searching Google, and picking the top result..

that's what it usually does when it doesn't recognize the bit i've stuck in.

like, I can type in just plain "livejournal" and it will bring me here, or "hotmail" and it takes me to hotmail.

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

An HTTP URL is a different thing to a valid Internet hostname(and indeed a valid internet hostname is different to a valid Internet hostname). A valid Internet hostname consists of a TLD, and a domain name, and a host name. Technically the host name can be omitted, if the domain is set up correctly to forward the right protocols to the right hosts.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Ah, right.

That kind of thing is why I can't use the http://tm/ form here -- either the browser (Opera) or the proxy decides to stick "www. .com" around it and I get http://www.tm.com/ instead. But http://tm./ works for me.

[pne.livejournal.com]

An HTTP URL is a different thing to a valid Internet hostname

Obviously.

However, an HTTP URL contains a component which refers to a host, and I was trying to find out what the constraints are on the validity of that portion of a URL; presumably (but I'm not sure) the same constraints that are placed on an Internet hostname.

A valid Internet hostname consists of a TLD, and a domain name, and a host name.

Do you have a reference for me?

Technically the host name can be omitted, if the domain is set up correctly to forward the right protocols to the right hosts.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. It seems to mean that, say, a domain must be set up to forward, say, HTTP traffic to example.com to a certain host.

However, AFAIK a valid host, in terms of Internet connectivity, is something that has an 'A' DNS record -- and while I consider it a bit strange to have a host called 'example.com', it's certainly possible to have an A record for that string, which will make it reachable via DNS. See, for example, http://simon-cozens.org/, which works because there's an A record for simon-cozens.org pointing to 193.201.200.229. There is no A record, on the other hand, for "www.simon-cozens.org", so http://www.simon-cozens.org/ will not work.

Now, there's an A record for 'tm', which points to 64.251.31.234, so it's possible to resolve this string to an IP address. (If you have a Unixoid system, then one of 'host tm', 'dig tm', or 'nslookup tm' may find this information for you.)

So since you can translate the string 'tm' to an IP address, that means that there is a machine which is reachable by that name, which makes it a hostname for that machine - no?

It might look weird, but I'm not sure what forbids this sort of thing, hence my call for references.

(Incidentally, a.b.c is not, in general, a full "hostname" in the way that I'd probably assign it to a host -- in particular, consider places such as the UK where there are few hosts called foo.bar.uk, instead being under foo.bar.co.uk or foo.bar.org.uk or the like; similarly with Japan which traditionally had *.ad.jp or *.ne.jp or *.or.jp, though there also seem to be *.jp, as witness http://www.gedas.jp/.)

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

I agree. I had misjudged how technically-minded you were, and was trying to dumb it down.

[subbes]

Neither work.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Meh.

That's several people for whom they don't work.

So that makes it not such a useful general-purpose tool.

Still, I thought it was nifty.

[ataltane.livejournal.com]

There also seem to be a handful of .co-less and .ac-less .uk hosts, like bl.uk (the British Library).

Ooh, a CONLANG technical pileup.

[volantwish]

i got XE from firefox, too :)

[ladyortyger.livejournal.com]

huh, that's odd, both work now...

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

tm. works, tm goes to xe.com

[me-and.livejournal.com]

There's a load of them - .uk is the top level domain, but anything below that is valid - it's just that the UK government doesn't allow anything for commercial use. Try .mil.uk, .nhs.uk, .police.uk...

[ataltane.livejournal.com]

I see! I've only ever had occasion to use bl.uk, but then I don't live in the UK (usually).