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

[dolphinling]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> 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.
> 
>>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.)

Hmm... perhaps your source could explain his reasoning here? :) It's 
extremely easy to make non-circumventable tracking, and I assumed that 
most times it _was_ circumventable were due to ignorance rather than an 
informed decision. To me, it seems, the benefits to an advertising 
company of doing so outweigh the benefits of not.


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