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

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, James Graham wrote:
>
> And boy does it suggest this feature will be a marketing problem :( 
> Darin Fisher blogged the Mozilla implementation[1] and received a stream 
> of comments, many from people who clearly haven't thought about how easy 
> tracking already is, to the effect that they will never use a browser 
> with this feature etc. It's hardly a representative sample of people 
> (since the more alarmed users are more likely to comment) but I can 
> easily imagine grossly unfair headlines like "Firefox 3 allows 
> advertisers to track you across the web", ignoring the fact that any 
> browser that implements HTTP redirects supports the same feature in a 
> much less transparent way.

Actually, I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people who 
understood that this would help rather than hurt. I was expecting much 
more negative feedback.


On Thu, 19 Jan 2006, Alexey Feldgendler wrote:
> 
> This would eventually lead to Mozilla and other browsers providing a 
> user-configurable option to ignore ping="", which in turn would make the 
> authors prefer the traditional (redirect-based) tracking because it's 
> not circumventable.

JavaScript is circumventable yet these same authors use that today, so I 
don't think that's necessarily the case.


On Thu, 19 Jan 2006, Tyler Close wrote:
> 
> I think the "ping" attribute is a great feature and I also think it's 
> great that the cited presentation of the feature provoked the reaction 
> that it did. Having a user base that expresses demand for privacy and 
> security is crucial to actually getting some privacy and security, which 
> is something I sorely want.

Indeed!


> The problem here is the presentation. In reality, the "ping" attribute 
> is a net plus for privacy and security, not a new threat. The feature 
> needs to be presented as something that will be applauded by "privacy 
> conscious folks", not something that will "raise some eye-brows".

Yeah. I've changed the note in the spec, hopefully that will help.

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