[whatwg] Feedback on Meta referrer

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 1/26/12 9:12 AM, Adam Barth wrote:
>> Should the speculative parser have knowledge of<meta name=referrer>?
>
> That's not what's currently specified.  Like many other browser
> features, this feature lets web sites detect that the browser is
> speculatively prefetching resources.  If that's a big issue, it's
> something we can try to address.

It seems like a bigger problem is that if speculative prefetches don't 
know about this <meta> then they will leak the referrer, which is 
something the site did NOT want to happen.  So it seems like either this 
<meta> needs to disable prefetch altogether or be taken into account 
when prefetching.  Either way, the prefetch code needs to know about it.

> I'm not sure all implementations have the speculative parser
> understand<base>.  For example, WebKit's preload scanner does not
> appear to understand the<base>  element:
>
> http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WebCore/html/parser/HTMLPreloadScanner.cpp

That's not as big a deal, because it will just mean you prefetch the 
wrong thing and have to do a second fetch.  (That said, I think we may 
have had bug reports about the prefetch not understanding <base>; Henri 
would know for sure).

-Boris