http://rel-shortlink.appspot.com

Short links are useful both for space-constrained (e.g. microblogging, mobile) and manual entry (e.g. printed, spoken) applications, however URL shortening services are causing problems of their own (e.g. linkrot, analytics, security, etc.).

The rel="shortlink" proposal (which is made available with copyright, patent and trademark waivers) solves this problem cleanly, with little or no risk of collateral damage.

The proposed alternative (rev="canonical") also has numerous problems (e.g. HTML 5 deprecation of "rev", taking rather than giving canonical-ness, dangerous failure modes resulting in SEO problems, etc.). Furthermore the rel="shorturl" alternative is both confusing with many permutations (short_url, shorturl, shorturi, etc.) and affected by intellectual property issues (copyright protected specification, trademark status claimed by shorturl.com, unknown patent status). This is a genuine effort to make the web a better place.

To the extent possible under the laws of Australia, Sam Johnston and Australian Online Solutions have waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to the shortlink specification. Furthermore, the authors neither assert nor are aware of any patent or trademark rights over the specification.