- From: Ronny Orbach <r@ronnyo.com>
- Date: Sun, 24 Apr 2011 15:02:42 +0300
Hey there, I've researched hyperlink authoring (http://bit.ly/pingspec), which IMO is a great feature, and it looks like the only browser which implements it today is Chrome - Check out http://bit.ly/chromeping and try for yourself: http://bit.ly/pingfiddle . Not sure why implementation and buzz around this are so minor and why it seems stuck 6 years after proposal, but I have some suggestions to make which will hopefully help make some progress. - This feature *must* come with a standard means of feature-detection. The reason link gateways became popular is that they're bulletproof - no one can bypass the ping. If authors can't be sure ping will work, they won't use it. However, regular feature-detection or UA sniffing won't suffice because the user can disable the feature*. So ideally, we could have a boolean property like Navigator.features.ping, so we could do if(!Navigator.features.ping) runPingShim(). On a side note, having a Navigator.features object for similar user-pref-controlled features might be useful in more cases. - I believe the following paragraph should be either removed or changed to use *may*: "When the?ping?attribute is present, user agents should clearly indicate to the user that following the hyperlink will also cause secondary requests to be sent in the background, possibly including listing the actual target URLs." No one will use a ping-system which freaks out users and tells them they're being tracked. What do you think? Ronny * Anyway, I can't think of a decent way to feature-detect this. Having the attribute on the node doesn't reveal support. So what, we should actually ping a test domain and set a cookie from it? Too slow and painful for that server. Any idea is appreciated. -- Ronny Orbach Front End Developer Conduit
Received on Sunday, 24 April 2011 05:02:42 UTC