[whatwg] Feedback on Meta referrer

[Adam Barth]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 1:35 AM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky at mit.edu> wrote:
> 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've added a TODO to http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Meta_referrer to add
this requirement.  I'm slightly unsure how to specify it because the
preload scanner isn't part of the spec's machinery, but we'll figure
out a way.

>> 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).

Makes sense.

Thanks,
Adam