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

[dolphinling]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Oct 2005, Matthew Thomas wrote:
> 
>>>...
>>>I'll leave it in until someone comes up with a better idea, so that we
>>>have a placeholder (and so that people who wish to experiment with the
>>>idea can do so -- there seems to be at least some interest in it).
>>>...
>>
>>But there is already a better idea: redirects. As dolphinling said, 
>>redirects will work while ping= doesn't. And the script you provided to 
>>get around that not only adds even more complexity, it also won't work 
>>for the 10 percent of visitors who don't have JavaScript turned on, 
>>while redirects still work in that case too.
> 
> 
> The script can be written backwards too, if that is a concern.

This still doesn't "force" it to work. As a user-tracking-implementer 
doing it for money, I want to make absolutely sure I count properly. 
That means forcing people to hit the counter _before_ even telling them 
where they're going, so they can't get around it. There's no way to do 
this with ping=.

>>But given the small proportion of authors who would use ping=
> 
> 
> I think you underestimate the potential number of sites that would use 
> this. This kind of tracking happens a _lot_ and people are always trying 
> to find ways of making that experience better. There have already been 
> people on this list saying they want something like this just within the 
> last few hours.

The audience of people who would use tracking is huge. The audience of 
people who would use ping= is, for the reasons I said before, much much 
smaller.

Like I said before, I like the semantics of ping=. But it doesn't fit 
into the usage model that advertisers and other trackers want. 
Semantically, I want notification and linking to be separate. In usage, 
they want them to be linked. They seem to me to be mutually exclusive.

-- 
dolphinling
<http://dolphinling.net/>