Comment 6 for bug 317136

A Web site's URLs are too long, so it clutters every page with a mechanism to generate a shorter URL? If I may make a modest suggestion ... Why don't you just make the original URL shorter to begin with?

For example, the ultimate URL for this bug report needn't be <https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/317136>, it could be <https://launchpad.net/bugs/317136>, with ?in=project appended for subsequent targets of multi-target bugs. And the URL for a merge proposal needn't be <https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~user/project/branch/+merge/number>, it could be <https://launchpad.net/~user/+merge/number>. There's no law saying the URL has to contain every step of the data model hierarchy, even if that's what Zope encourages.

Shortening the actual URL would help 100% of the people who wanted it to be shorter, whereas a shortcut redirect system would help only those people who knew and remembered to use that system instead of doing the usual thing and copying from their browser's URL field.