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"In speaking with a few colleagues, it appears Twitter is using the 301 redirect on the short URL to provide the mouseover with the full URL." Is this just a n
by teye 16y ago
"In speaking with a few colleagues, it appears Twitter is using the 301 redirect on the short URL to provide the mouseover with the full URL."
Is this just a non-technical person attempting to inject a little detail into the article? My first thought was, "How would I do this in JS?" and it took me a second to decipher that sentence.
- treyp 16y agokind of. it's not done on the front end (js) but rather using some service on the backend. the phrasing of that is a bit weird, but they probably test until they no longer get a 301 or 302 redirect and save the result. they print this result on the front end as a title for the link and as an HTML5 data attribute "expanded-url" on the link.
- jluxenberg 16y agoI looked at doing this using Javascript in a browser extension a while ago, and it's actually not possible to do for a couple of reasons: 1) XHR cross domain policy prohibits requests to domains other than the domain the page loaded from 2) the XHR GET method always follows a 301 redirect and returns the content at the URL. The full URL is not made available.
- RyanMcGreal 16y agoYou'd have to write something on your server that does this, and expose it to your client JS via a local URL.
- jaxn 16y agoI think so. I am not HTTP expert, but my understanding is that a 301 is a RESPONSE not a REQUEST. What is most certainly happening is that Twitter is making a HEAD request to URLs to see if a redirect is happening. The http redirect is a RESPONSE of type 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary). And yes, I suspect this is happening somewhere that can be cached. It would be easy to tell by setting up a 301 redirect, posting it to twitter, and watching the server logs.