[whatwg] <a href="" ping="">

Fri Oct 21 20:26:55 PDT 2005

> 
> Bearing the above in mind, I've added a section to the <a> 
> element that describes a ping="" attribute. The URIs given in 
> this attribute would be followed when the user clicks the 
> link, thus getting around the problems listed above.
The term 'ping' in terms of RSS/blogs often means to POST some data, but in
this case, it would be a GET request - that may get confusing. 
Perhaps 'also-get' or 'snoop-href' something like that.

Ideally, the data within the tags would be able to have more than one anchor
and each would have different roles, but I don't think HTML supports that
(except for the <link> elements in the <head> section since they apply to
the containing document). For example: 
 <a href='...' rel='default'><a href='...' rel='snoop'>this uses nested
anchors - which are illegal</a></a>
(nested anchors are illegal I know...
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.2.2)

So the pragmatic alternative is exactly as you suggest - a new attribute.

> Thoughts? Is it evil?
Yes, but even the anti-christ is just another customer.