- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:08:53 -0600
- To: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>
- CC: HTML WG List <public-html@w3.org>
Mark Baker wrote: > So this is where we disagree. I believe that the meaning of the > message is defined by the intent of the user If we're going to talk about user intentions, we have to accept the fact that most users have no idea how GET and POST differ, see no difference between clicking on a link and a button, and wouldn't be able to tell apart: <a href="http://www.example.com" style="color: black; text-decoration: underline">Click me</a> and <form action="http://www.example.com" method="POST"> <input type="image" style="color: black; text-decoration: underline" alt="Click me"> </form> Try it in trunk Firefox, please. So I don't think the user is putting any meaning into this message other than "Do whatever you're claiming will happen if I click this doohickey". There's nothing magic about links that makes them idempotent or whatnot in users' eyes. Same for forms. What matters to users is not the mechanism (which they are not aware of anyway) but the context in which the mechanism appears. For example, users would tend to assume (quite reasonably) that <a href="...">Make purchase!</a> is not idempotent. In any case, as far as I can see the spec is concerned with the meaning of the ping message. There is a separate concern, which is whether the user wants to be sending that message. But that's a matter of deciding whether to send the ping at all, not of deciding how to send it. -Boris
Received on Thursday, 8 November 2007 19:09:38 UTC