[whatwg] unexpected use of the CORS specification

[Marius Gundersen]

This could lead to a lot of requests being made by the client, just to check
a url. If a page contains 100 links, then 100 HEAD requests need to be made,
and in most cases they will be plain old ordinary links, so no 301
redirects. The browser could do the check when you mouse over the link, that
is, when the tooltip appears. This would reduce the number of requests being
made, but it would still result in a lot of requests being made just to get
a (useless) 200 OK reply.

This should be a simple thing to implement as an extension in Firefox or as
a patch to webkit, so we can see how effective it would be.

Marius Gundersen



On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 6:35 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer
<silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> a friend of mine just wrote an interesting blog post about
> "unshortening twitter URLs", see
> http://benno.id.au/blog/2009/11/08/urlunshortener .
>
> In it he proposes that url shorteners should be treated specially in
> browsers such that when you mouse over a shortened url, the browse
> knows to interpret them (i.e. follow the redirection) and shows you
> the long URL as a hint. I would support such an approach, since I have
> been annoyed more than once that shortened URLs don't tell me anything
> about the target. As part of this would be a requirement for URL
> shorteners to support CORS http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/, which browsers
> can then use to follow the redirection.
>
> Further, Benno suggests extending http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/
> with a property to disable following redirects automatically so as to
> be able to expose the redirection.
>
> I am not aware if somebody else has suggested these use cases for CORS
> and XMLHttpRequest before (this may not even be the right fora for
> it), but since these are so closely linked to what we do in HTML5, I
> thought it would be good to point it out. I would think that at
> minimum Anne knows what to do with it, since he is editor on both.
>
> Regards,
> Silvia.
>
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