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

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 21 Oct 2005, dolphinling wrote:
> > 
> > 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=.

In practice, you usually can tell where the link is going, so there isn't 
really any way to stop the user doing that anyway. Also, at least one of 
the biggest Web advertisement companies would rather let a user go to the 
target site without tracking them than track them against their wishes -- 
I'd hope that this actually applies to all the big advertisement 
companies, though I could believe that it does not.

At the moment, there isn't a sane way to offer that option.


> 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.

Well sure, initially at least. Similar things apply to most new ideas. You 
could say something like that for CSS, even. That's not a reason to give 
up! :-)


> 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.

In my experience, "they" are ok with it being separate, as it conveys a 
number of benefits to the user. (I would consider my source on this matter 
reasonably authoritative.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'