Bug 30458

Summary: Implement <a ping>
Product: WebKit Reporter: John Abd-El-Malek <jam>
Component: WebCore Misc.Assignee: Nate Chapin <japhet>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED    
Severity: Normal CC: abarth, commit-queue, darin, emacemac7, eric, webkit.review.bot
Priority: P2    
Version: 528+ (Nightly build)   
Hardware: PC   
OS: OS X 10.5   
Attachments:
Description Flags
ping support (disabled by default) fishd: review+

Description John Abd-El-Malek 2009-10-16 14:13:54 PDT 
Creating a bug from the webkit-dev discussion.  It seems there's consensus on doing this.  The main reasons are that without a robust way to handle tracking, ad networks and other sites are resorting to redirects and busy loops in unload handlers after image loads.  This hurts the user since it slows down their navigation and consumes battery on mobile/laptop devices.  Adding ping doesn't reduce the privacy, since it's something that's already done using hacks.  This should improve privacy since user agents can then expose options to the user to disable this feature, just like for referral headers.

This is part of HTML5: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#hyperlink-auditing

Note: once we do this, there are a few people who think we should implement window.sendPing() as well.  The reasons are that <a ping> won't work for iframes, which is how it's used by ad networks.
Comment 1 John Abd-El-Malek 2009-10-16 14:52:56 PDT 
The webkit-dev thread: https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2009-September/thread.html#9925
Comment 2 Nate Chapin 2010-09-22 11:52:40 PDT 
Created attachment 68406 [details]
ping support (disabled by default)
Comment 3 Darin Fisher (:fishd, Google) 2010-09-22 12:40:55 PDT 
Comment on attachment 68406 [details]
ping support (disabled by default)

r=me
Comment 4 Nate Chapin 2010-09-22 16:51:44 PDT 
Comment on attachment 68406 [details]
ping support (disabled by default)

Clearing cq+ because it won't land before I leave for the day.  Will land tomorrow.
Comment 5 Alexey Proskuryakov 2010-09-22 17:33:08 PDT 
Comment on attachment 68406 [details]
ping support (disabled by default)

+        * WebKit.order:

You needn't modify this. Only Apple uses this file, and we update it when we need to.
Comment 6 Nate Chapin 2010-09-23 12:55:18 PDT 
http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/68166