[whatwg] noreferrer link relation clarifications

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 20 Oct 2009, Nate Chapin wrote:
>
> I was wondering if I could get some clarification about a couple things in
> the specification of the noreferrer link relation:
> 1.  Is it the intent for the opener attribute to potentially be non-null
> when a hyperlink does not create a new browsing context?

I don't understand the question.

window.opener is set to whatever the Window was that caused this Window to 
be opened. It is only tangentially related to hyperlinks, in that 
hyperlinks can be a way to open windows.


> That is, should any page that cares to use the noreferrer link relation 
> and truly wants to suppress the opener attribute be expected to do that 
> suppression manually or use target="_blank"?

Without using target="", there's no new opener window to suppress, as far 
as I can tell.


> I'm not clear whether there's any reason for the source page to care 
> whether its opener is exposed, rather than just being concerned whether 
> it appears as the opener.

As far as I'm aware, there's no reason to care about whether one's opener 
is exposed at all. The only reason that one would suppress the opener is 
to allow multi-process browsers like Chrome to sever the connection 
between the two, allowing the new window to run in a new process.


> 2.  What is the proper behavior of a statement like <a rel="noreferrer" 
> href="#foo">Scroll to foo</a> ?  It's a bit absurd to suppress to be 
> requesting that a referrer not be sent for a scrolling action (since no 
> requests should be sent anyway), so presumably the behavior is simply to 
> ensure that the opener attribute remains intact?

There's no request here and no browsing context is opened, so 
rel=noreferrer would have no effect in this case.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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