This e-mail contains replies to a number of e-mails received on the topic
of the proposed ping= attribute since January 2006. Since e-mail on this
topic was sent to both the WHATWG and HTMLWG mailing lists, I have cc'ed
both on this e-mail. Please pick just one when replying. Thanks!
On Thu, 19 Jan 2006, Tyler Close wrote:
On 1/19/06, Jim Ley [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On 1/19/06, Tyler Close [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I think it would be fair to characterize current techniques for link
click tracking as opaque. In contrast, the proposed ping
attribute explicitly declares in the HTML what is intended and how
it will happen. Perhaps the right way to explain the ping
attribute is as providing transparent, or explicit, feedback;
shining a light on the dark corners of click tracking. If it is
explained that the feature will make link click tracking explicit,
controllable and more usable, I think the user base will react more
positively.
No, they'll just disable it, as it does them directly no benefit and
has a cost, so if you educate them enough to make a decision, they
will not decide to be tracked.
Why hasn't this happened to the HTTP Referer header?
Well, to a very small extent, it has. And indeed I would expect the same
level of response to the ping= attribute as the HTTP Referer header
received. This is actually a good thing -- we want people who want their
privacy protected to this degree to be able to do so. Right now, they
can't, because the existing tracking methods are roadblocks to the content
they are tracking, and thus can't be bypassed.
The ping= attribute is intended to help users. Right now, user tracking
happens widely, but suffers from a number of problems, including being:
* non-transparent (users can't see what's being pinged easily)
* non-optional (users can't disable it)
* slow (adding DNS and TCP roundtrip to every tracked request)
* obfuscated (the final target is usually hard to determine)
ping= solves all of these problems. It also helps the authoring side by
making the tracking cleaner and making the user experience better, which
should be enough to get authors to switch (we've already had a number of
authors say they would use it as soon as it was widely available, some
even said they'd use it earlier on a per-browser basis!).
Since the main use of tracking has a direct economic cost to many
parties the sites will then return to using the established successful
methods for tracking, no-one will gain and browsers would've wasted
lots of time that could've been spent on more productive features.
I think an economic analysis of the scenario is a valid approach. Could
you spell out your argument in more detail? For example, after I've
submitted a search request to Google, what is the economic cost to me of
letting Google know which result I selected? What is the economic
benefit to me of providing this information to Google?
I can see an argument that there is a net benefit to me to provide this
information. I don't see a clear argument that there is a net cost to
me. At the start of the exchange, the thing of value that I have are my
search terms. Once I've given those up, Google already has most of what
it needs to effectively advertise to me. Allowing Google to know which
result was most relevant to me might mean I get more value in the future
for revealing my search terms, in terms of better query results.
I'm interested to hear your economic analysis.
Jim was presumably referring to the ability to use ping= for tracking
advertisments, and was suggesting that companies might be so greedy that
they would refuse to use ping= for fear of not tracking users that had
disabled the feature. Continuing with your theme above of a Google query,
the theory might be that Google would value profit over user preferences
so much that they would not use ping= for tracking conversions. I could
assure you that this is not the case, I'm sure many people wouldn't be
convinced. However, there is already a way to bypass the conversion
tracking for ads: simply copy the URL given in the ad and paste it into
your location bar. If greed was really beating the user's experience, I
would presume that this would not be made available.
On Fri, 20 Jan 2006, Thomas Much wrote:
There are browsers out there that let the user disable the HTTP referrer
(and enable it only for certain sites that require it for whatever
reasons). And our users definitely use this feature.
That's why we need to provide ping=. There's no way to do this at the
moment. Users aren't able to disable tracking right now. They should be
able to.
On Thu, 19 Jan 2006, James Graham wrote:
Indeed. I believe that even browsers significantly more popular than
iCab allow for this. Yet the vast majority of people leave the feature
on.
Indeed. That's why we should not be worried about authors not using the
