Hacker News Reader

Instead of changing the URL you could use the "title" attribute on the "a" tag. On most browsers hovering over the link will display the attribute.

View on HN

How does that help in situations where HTML isn't being used, though? I'm thinking of plain text emails, discussion forums that don't allow custom markup, discussion forums that generate markup automatically for URLs, and so forth.

I find long URLs to be annoying in email since you never know if they will get wrapped and broken somewhere along the way. And, if you're emailing a URL to someone you are presumably providing some text to explain what it is, so why do you need extra junk in the URL?

You can already add whatever you want to the URL if you really think it needs to be verbose:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7536719&title=whatever-...

I think he's talking about making the URLs readable out in the wild, e.g Twitter

Reply on news.ycombinator.com