- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:02:47 -0400
- To: www-tag@w3.org
For several years, the canonical example of applications causing unsafe GETs were emails with confirmation links, as in an email that says "click here to confirm your magazine subscription." Although this is clearly a violation [1] of Web architecture and in particular the HTTP specification [2], one could argue that in practice damage was limited by the fact that offending links occurred in emails, that most of those emails would be unlikely to be managed by the sorts of tools that would aggressively prefetch the links (though some email readers do this when preparing to go into "travel mode"), I think. Anyway, it seems the trouble is getting worse. I just noticed the Twit [3] from JetBlue. It says: "Wisdom of crowds time What's your favorite JetBlue snack http://tr.im/jbsnacks: Blue Chips (1) or Munchies Mix (2) ? http://tinyurl.com/d4gjww" It's not 100% clear that votes are being tallied based on the link you click, but it seems implicit in the "wisdom of crowds" leadin. I suppose that if the Google crawler finds this particular Twit, it will cast one vote for each snack, and move on. Noah [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/whenToUseGet.html#safe [2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt [3] http://twitter.com/JetBlue/statuses/2178983316 -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
Received on Monday, 15 June 2009 17:01:34 UTC