Re: Feedback on the ping="" attribute (ISSUE-1)

[Resending to list.]

On Nov 3, 2007, at 11:50, Julian Reschke wrote:

> I did *not* recommend to use HEAD instead of GET.

Oh. Then I've misunderstood. Sorry.

> HEAD and GET have the same semantics, expect for the response body  
> not being present for HEAD.

Per RFC 2616, yes. However, de facto, that could change if there were  
sufficient value in treating them as having different semantics. And  
using HEAD for pings would cause just that (even if the spec  
vehemently insisted otherwise).

> A server that implements a ping target resource has the choice what  
> representation to return for that URI. The cheapest and sanest  
> thing to do would be to return an empty body, thus making GET and  
> HEAD behave *exactly* the same.

That's not the point. My point was that if browsers were consistently  
known to do HEAD requests, there'd be value in servers *not* behaving  
the same on GET as far as there internal state was concerned.

> Finally, my understanding was that the ping URI does *not* point to  
> the ad server (which sees the GET on the href target + the Referer  
> header), but for the convenience of the site *containing* the  
> hyperlink.

I thought the pings would go to a server operated by an ad broker-- 
not the site the user sees the ads on. (Or that they'd go to both so  
that the site could corroborate the click-through rate claims made by  
the ad broker.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Saturday, 3 November 2007 19:07:57 UTC