Benjamin Lees <emufarmers(a)gmail.com> writes:
I see two different use cases here: one, you have URLs
that need to be
short so they can fit in Twitter messages and the like. Here, it
doesn't matter whether the URL is human-readable, as long as it's
short. The other use case is that you want to give people a
human-rememberable URL in speech or on TV or the like, where it can't
be hyperlinked. There it should be short but ideally also
descriptive.
There is a third use case that people on zhwiki, hiwiki, arwiki and
other wikis that don't use latinate characters have: avoiding URI
encoding.
For example, <http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/数学结构>, when it is copy-pasted
from Firefox, becomes
<http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%95%B0%E5%AD%A6%E7%BB%93%E6%9E%84>.
The same goes for <http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/मुखपृष्ठ>, which becomes
<http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%96%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%83%E0%A4%B7%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A0>.
From what I can see, the micro-blogging use case fits
the needs of these
users nicely.
Mark.