How to create cross-platform Internet shortcut files

I found a reasonable cross-platform solution. This HTML document could be used as a shortcut to stackoverflow.com, and it would immediately redirect to that site when opened from the desktop:

<html>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
    window.location.href = "http://stackoverflow.com"; //change this to the URL
                                                       //you want to redirect to
</script>
</body>
</html>

Credit to Evan Mattson from the comments.

From W3C, Technique H76: Using meta refresh to create an instant client-side redirect:

The objective of this technique is to enable redirects on the client side without confusing the user. Redirects are preferably implemented on the server side (see SVR1: Implementing automatic redirects on the server side instead of on the client side (SERVER) ), but authors do not always have control over server-side technologies.

Example from the link above:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">    
  <head>      
    <title>The Tudors</title>      
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL='http://thetudors.example.com/'" />    
  </head>    
  <body> 
    <p>This page has moved to a <a href="http://thetudors.example.com/">
      theTudors.example.com</a>.</p> 
  </body>  
</html>

Basically, a refresh is done after zero seconds (immediately) to the specified URL, before the page content is loaded, and without JavaScript.


You can define a file named as following - MyInternetShortcut.url.

It's content should be:

[InternetShortcut]
URL=https://my.amazingsite.com/

This works on Windows and macOS.

Tags:

Shortcuts

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