annex:: urls are long, and in some situations it's useful to have a nice short url

How about supporting an url like "annex::https://example.com/foo", where the http url redirects to the full annex url. Then any url shortener can be used. --Joey

This might be a security problem. An arbitrary annex:: url can access an arbitrary resource. Eg, it might be a directory special remote, using any directory on the user's computer, and they won't know if it's hidden behind a http redirect.

Perhaps that could be dealt with by displaying information about the special remote and prompting if it's ok to use. But users generally say "yes" without thinking.

Perhaps it could be limited to safe special remotes. httpalso is surely safe in this context. Would anything else be? Any external special remotes? --Joey

Implemented this, but it was being a bit hard to handle a redirect to an annex:: url, and in any case with httpalso, the user has a web server they can host files on. So made the url be downloaded as a file, and the first line contains the complete annex:: url. done