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.