[whatwg] <a onlyreplace>

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 1:10 PM, Markus Ernst <derernst at gmx.ch> wrote:
> Aryeh Gregor schrieb:
>> But it breaks progressive rendering, which could be extremely
>> annoying.  The user might give up after a second or two of no
>> response, as the (possibly quite long) page is fetched and parsed.
>
> This is true. So using this as a feature to exclude pages from being
> "onlyreplaced" should be discouraged, authors should set onlyreplace to
> false (resp. not set the onlyreplace attribute) on the links to those pages.

The problem I see here (as an author) is that the attribute *will*
accidentally get placed where it shouldn't.  From the user's point of
view, this dramatically slows down clicking the link (making them
annoyed at my site), but in a way that's very difficult for me to
notice.  It's an X% chance that clicking a given link will be
inexplicably slow, at random, if I use this feature.  The value of X
will vary based on all sorts of things, some possibly beyond my
control.  It's a risk that would definitely count against the feature
if I were deciding whether to use it.

In short, accidental misuse should be harmless if possible.  For
something to be just harmless enough that authors won't notice it, but
harmful enough to significantly annoy users, is bad.  In some ways
even worse than catastrophic failure on misuse, although in most ways
better.