I agree that URL shorteners are bad for the web in the long run. Link shorteners defeat the centralized nature of the web as they introduce an external redirection service that is not in your control. When that service disappears, your resources become unreachable.
But is the rev="canonical" that is being floated now going to fix the problem? It can not.
As Ben Ramsey points out, the rev relation is ill-defined. More importantly, why not just use the short URI as the value of hrefs in the first place? I don’t get it.
