- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2011 07:52:59 +0300
Ronny Orbach wrote: > I've researched hyperlink authoring You seem to mean hyperlink _auditing_, specifically using the proposed ping="..." attribute. > which IMO is a great feature, To me, it seems that it mostly generates the types of problems that it is supposed to solve. > and it looks like the only browser which > implements it today is Chrome As an aside, when using Chrome debugging mode, the "Network" pane shows no request corresponding to the ping attribute, and no POST request whatsoever. This might be just a bug^H^H^Hfeature in Chrome debugger. > Not sure why implementation and buzz around this are so minor Apart from lack of practical need and apart from obvious problems, you mean? :-) The attribute seems to do nothing that could not be done using existing other techniques. While it superficially makes "hyperlink auditing" easier to authors, who would use it? If it is something that can be easily disabled by users, why would it be used, instead of current methods? The advantages listed at http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/links.html#hyperlink-auditing are theoretically good-looking from the educated user's perspective. But site administrators and advertizers have a completely different perspective. Besides, most users would just get confused with the issue if they were told about it. > If authors can't be sure ping will work, > they won't use it. Indeed. > 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(). Why would we introduce a feature for the sake of giving users the control, then develop methods for defeating that control because authors wouldn't use the feature otherwise? And they won't use it anyway, as it's much simpler and safer to keep doing what they do now. > No one will use a > ping-system which freaks out users and tells them they're being > tracked. Well, no one except a few idealists - a far too small population of authors to be considered seriously. -- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Tuesday, 26 April 2011 21:52:59 UTC