- From: Jon Barnett <jonbarnett@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2007 09:03:32 -0500
- To: "HTML WG" <public-html@w3.org>
- Message-ID: <bde87dd20707050703s1da23050l320c7cba173672e7@mail.gmail.com>
I took a crack at writing up the wiki page for the @ping attribute. Feel free to hack it to pieces. I searched the archives for this list, but I didn't find any results regarding the @ping attribute. I did all my searching on the WHATWG mailing list archives. My personal opinion on this: @ping fails the "flip test". [1] Let's say that the only way to track click-throughs is the @ping attribute, then someone introduces a new method of using server-side scripting and redirects to track click-throughs. These redirects are foolproof and can't be circumvented by the end-user. The redirects are nearly invisible to the end user, and tracking is much more accurate. Most people who care about tracking would choose the latter. Yes, the redirect takes time, but most users don't notice - I usually don't. Yes, the destination URL is obscured, but URLs are not particularly useful to most end users. Even if end users actually hover a link to see its URL in a status bar, my tracking URL can still be helpful. For example, my URL http://www.example.com/redirect/123/ESPN.com-article-about-Basebrawl-Feveris more informative than the destination http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1239718 - it tells me where the link is going and what the destination link is about. The actual destination URL is not very informative. It would be more advantageous to encourage authors to use better, more informative @title attributes than it would be to use @ping to expose the destination URL to the end user, especially when that destination URL is cryptic to most end users. <a title="ESPN.com - Basebrawl Fever" href="tracking-redirect"> is better than both of the above. So, I think that @ping is not harmful, but its advantages are far outweighed by its disadvantages to those who care about accurate tracking. Some opinions say that the benefit to end users is more advantageous and that advertisers would still use it. Whether its actual usage will be enough to justify it is debatable [1] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070125/095301.shtml -- Jon Barnett
Received on Thursday, 5 July 2007 14:11:07 UTC