Re: [whatwg] Referer header sent with <a ping>?

Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> 
> On Feb 8, 2008, at 5:58 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
>> This e-mail is a response to all the recent ping="" feedback.
> 
> Not really.  My consensus-o-meter says that ping should be removed from
> the specification.  I see no actual implementations, demonstrated
> evidence that it is a bad idea, and an overwhelming number of comments
> that indicate it isn't desirable in HTML.  There is no evidence
> whatsoever to indicate it is ready for standardization, and all you
> are doing at this point is ignoring the substantive objections by
> adding more hacks around an inherently broken and undesirable feature.
> 
> In other words, you are wasting our time.
> 
> ....Roy

Indeed.

The way it's currently specified seems to be based on workarounds and 
hacks, not a proper design, such as cramming an illegal value into the 
HTTP "Referer" header.

It's one thing to try to document non-compliant behavior because it's 
already widely in use (content-type sniffing), but something completely 
different to design new protocol features knowingly violating the base 
specification.

BR, Julian