[whatwg] Feedback on the ping="" attribute (ISSUE-1)

[Boris Zbarsky]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> I agree that ping="" should be made visible to users. Indeed, the spec 
> explicitly makes that a SHOULD, going far outside its usual boundary of 
> not specifying user interface requirements.

For what it's worth, this thread sparked some discussion at
<http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/browse_thread/thread/a8469770c8f9fe52/a014d681071eb449#a014d681071eb449>.

The current state of things seems to be that creating a UI for this that would 
actually mean something to users without at the same time being completely in 
your face isn't really all that feasible.  For example, most users never look at 
the status bar when hovering over a link.

There will likely end up being an extension or something that will flag pings in 
the status bar for those who truly care, of course.  I would be very surprised 
if no one creates one.

As far as the default behavior goes, the current approach seems likely to be to 
provide no UI indication, and possibly to only allow pings to URIs that are 
same-host with the originating page (note same-host, and not same-origin, though 
that might end up changing too, of course).  And there would be preference UI to 
disable this behavior altogether, naturally.

> Actually we did consider UI at the time (I was involved in the 
> discussions). I would be interested in hearing details about the idea I 
> suggested above, namely of putting the domain names of the hosts to be 
> pinged in brackets after the link's own URI in the status bar:
> 
>    http://www.example.com/foo/bar (tracked by example.net)

That's one of the possibilities talked about in the thread above.

-Boris