Lachlan Hunt wrote:
J. Graham wrote:
On Sat, 22 Oct 2005, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
It could be defined in reverse, where the ping attribute (probably
given a more suitable name, but I'll use ping for now) could be
advisory information about the final destination and the href
attribute defines the ping destination, such that following the href
attribute would perform a redirect, but WA1 UAs could use the URI in
the ping attribute to notify the user of the final destination (such
as displaying it in the status bar).
<a href="scamsite.com" ping="ebay.com">
<a href="http://scamsite.com/">Ebay.com</a>
What's the difference?
In one case the status bar reveals the true location, in the other case
it doesn't.
Sure it's not much in the face of an alert and savvy web user but
there's a reason channging the status bar via js can be disabled (is
it disabled by default?)
Sure, scams are always a risk. It could be defined that if the location
returned with the redirect does not match that in the ping attribute,
that the user should be immediately notified of the deception. For
legitimate cases, where the href is merely a redirection to the final
destination, the user will get there without any problems.
So why not enforce this case by making the client do a redirect as soon
as it receives a response from the original URL:
<a href="tracker.cgi" redirect="destination.html">
On receiving a response from tracker.cgi the client would redirect to
destination.html, irrespective of the contents of the response. It would
allow the correct destination to be displayed in the status bar which,
as far as I can tell, is the only merit of the original 'ping' proposal,
but still has the disadvantage that no-one would use it (since a UA
could easily disable contacting tracker.cgi, making it useless for
advertisers). It does, however, have a reasonable backward
compatibility story (tracker.cgi would typically take a URL parameter
which it would redirect to). The big problem is that it seems horrible
to implement, as one has to have special handling at the network level
for requests initiated from a link with a redirect attribute.
--
"It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people
believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly
that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise."
-- http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html