This irked me on a few levels too.

Skywing · on Dec 22, 2011

I don't understand the problem. What is wrong with the example they've given?

tednaleid · on Dec 22, 2011

It's because they're using an url shortener in a non-twitter/character limited situation. Makes the browser need to go through a couple of jumps to load something that the user will want to load fast.

alecperkins · on Dec 22, 2011

Also, it's bad practice to obfuscate the urls to scripts (outside of an automatic concat/compress process), especially external ones.

Skywing · on Dec 22, 2011

Oh, I understand. Whenever I read the Hogan site, initially, I didn't realize that they were suggesting that people actually use that URL in production.

thenduks · on Dec 22, 2011

Of course they aren't advocating that. They're just saying you can try it out by dropping that script tag on your page.

Their first suggestion, and the one they are definitely implicitly recommending, is: "Use it as a part of your asset packager to compile templates ahead of time..."

kgwxd · on Dec 22, 2011

Is it possible using goo.gl might get you something like a poor mans CDN? I'm thinking it may possibly respond immediately with cached results.

rhubarbquid · on Dec 22, 2011

No, it responds with a redirect:

    $ curl http://goo.gl/OCK7V
    <HTML>
    <HEAD>
    <TITLE>Moved Permanently</TITLE>
    </HEAD>
    <BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000">
    <H1>Moved Permanently</H1>
    The document has moved <A HREF="http://twitter.github.com/hogan.js/1.0.0/hogan.js">here    </A>.
    </BODY>
    </HTML>

Edit: I suppose the headers are more important:

    $ curl -I http://goo.gl/OCK7V
    HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
    Expires: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:18:46 GMT
    Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:18:46 GMT
    Cache-Control: private, max-age=86400
    Location: http://twitter.github.com/hogan.js/1.0.0/hogan.js
    X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
    X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
    X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
    Server: GSE
    Transfer-Encoding: chunked

mburns · on Dec 22, 2011

No. Regardless, a second DNS query will have to be performed by the client when Google responds with the permanent redirect.

adgar · on Dec 23, 2011

> I'm thinking it may possibly respond immediately with cached results.

Just because nobody explicitly said it - a 301 redirect is actually cacheable per §10.3.2 of RFC 2616. But google doesn't set a long cache duration - another one of your responders posted the response headers, it was 86400s which is 1 day.

adgar · on Dec 22, 2011

It's almost as if they think RTTs are free.