[whatwg] Feedback on Meta referrer

Mon Jan 9 00:53:51 PST 2012

On Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:37:05 +0100, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky at mit.edu> wrote:

> On 1/2/12 1:55 AM, Simon Pieters wrote:
>> What about:
>>
>> <head>
>> <script src="foo.js"></script>
>> <meta name="referrer" content="never">
>> <link rel="stylesheet" href="a.css">
>> </head>
>>
>> ...and the browser speculatively fetches the stylesheet before the
>> <meta> element is in the DOM? Should the speculative parser have
>> knowledge of <meta name=referrer>?
>
> I would say it should handle this just like it handles <base> tags,  
> whether that's through keeping track of it or through the speculation  
> failing.

OK, so the speculative parser needs to scan for the feature. My thinking  
was that the speculative parser currently doesn't need to look at <meta>,  
but it does look at <base>, and usually there's zero or one <base> but can  
be lots of <meta>s, so it could be slightly cheaper to put this on <base>  
compared to <meta>. Maybe the difference is negligible, though.

>>> Yeah. Is there some precedent we should look to here? Perhaps the
>>> <base> element?
>>
>> Perhaps this should even be an attribute on <base> -- <base  
>> referrer="...">
>
> Note that when you have multiple <base> tags only the _first_ takes  
> effect,

Only for the same attribute -- if you have one <base href> and one <base  
target> they both get applied. (Which still isn't the proposed behavior  
for <meta referrer>, I know.)

> which is not the proposed behavior for <meta referrer>...

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software