Ian Hickson wrote:
On Fri, 21 Oct 2005, dolphinling wrote:
The script can be written backwards too, if that is a concern.
This still doesn't "force" it to work. As a user-tracking-implementer
doing it for money, I want to make absolutely sure I count properly.
That means forcing people to hit the counter _before_ even telling them
where they're going, so they can't get around it. There's no way to do
this with ping=.
In practice, you usually can tell where the link is going, so there isn't
really any way to stop the user doing that anyway. Also, at least one of
the biggest Web advertisement companies would rather let a user go to the
target site without tracking them than track them against their wishes --
I'd hope that this actually applies to all the big advertisement
companies, though I could believe that it does not.
At the moment, there isn't a sane way to offer that option.
Like I said before, I like the semantics of ping=. But it doesn't fit
into the usage model that advertisers and other trackers want.
Semantically, I want notification and linking to be separate. In usage,
they want them to be linked. They seem to me to be mutually exclusive.
In my experience, "they" are ok with it being separate, as it conveys a
number of benefits to the user. (I would consider my source on this matter
reasonably authoritative.)
Hmm... perhaps your source could explain his reasoning here? :) It's
extremely easy to make non-circumventable tracking, and I assumed that
most times it _was_ circumventable were due to ignorance rather than an
informed decision. To me, it seems, the benefits to an advertising
company of doing so outweigh the benefits of not.
--
dolphinling
<http://dolphinling.net/>
