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

[Jim Ley]

On 10/22/05, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Oct 2005, S. Mike Dierken wrote:
> > Oh, that really shouldn't be done via POST. Clicking a link should be
> > safe and sending a POST as a side-effect is not safe.
>
> GET means that you can do it again without affecting anything. In the case
> of tracking, you can't -- the very act of contacting that tracking URI can
> cost someone money. Hence POST. (This is another advantage of ping over
> redirects, come to think of it.)

No!, because just because someone has done it again doesn't mean that
no money should change hands.  If I provide a site that ends up
linking to X, and people fail to remember where X is but instead use
the adverts on my site, I'm still providing the service.

For me this is simply not going to work, adaware, norton internet
privacy, and similar etc. will soon reconfigure the browser to stop
the ping's, as it's irrelevant to the user experience users won't
care, however major search engines which derive significant income
from tracking will have to revert to detection methods

The previously proposed "is ping supported" script is definately not
sufficient for even coping with todays browsers let alone future ones
which disable the tracking.

Redirects work because the user cannot get the information they're
paying for without being tracked (except of course in the case of many
google adverts which leave the destination url in the tracking uri
which means google loses the money for those clicks.)  As you're now
making it trivial for users to get their information for free I can't
see what possible advantage this is to anyone trying to track
reliably.

As I and the site know this is going to under account for my clicks, I
fail to see how a 3rd party ad broker using this could survive any
sort of audit of their service, they would simply not be providing an
accurate service.

For unreliable tracking, it's more relevant certainly, but the
unreliable tracking use case isn't a great one, and I certainly don't
see the point of new stuff.

Jim.