ping Attribute
One of the attributes I somehow missed with the HTML5 revolution was the ping attribute; Other attributes were more popular, download being one of them. Hell, I just stumbled upon the ping attribute while reading an old forum post. The ping attribute of an a element represents a list of URLs to POST to when the link is clicked.
A sample usage of the ping attribute would look as follows:
<a href="/checkout" ping="/tracking/going-to-cart">Checkout</a>
I tried writing the POST data to file but the PHP $_POST array was empty, so I can only assume no data is passed. As for why you'd use the attribute...I don't know. JavaScript tools provide tracking capabilities so I can only assume these POST pings can be coupled with session tracking to get more detailed information.
Have you used the ping attribute before? If so please let me know what you used it for!
![5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed]()
When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It." Can you blame us though? We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...
![Write Simple, Elegant and Maintainable Media Queries with Sass]()
I spent a few months experimenting with different approaches for writing simple, elegant and maintainable media queries with Sass. Each solution had something that I really liked, but I couldn't find one that covered everything I needed to do, so I ventured into creating my...
![Create a 3D Animating Sidebar]()
Mozilla's Christian Heilmann is an evangelist that knows how to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. You'll often see him creating sweet demos on his blog or the awesome Mozilla Hacks blog. One of my favorite pieces...
![Highlighter: A MooTools Search & Highlight Plugin]()
Searching within the page is a major browser functionality, but what if we could code a search box in JavaScript that would do the same thing? I set out to do that using MooTools and ended up with a pretty decent solution.
The MooTools JavaScript Class
The...
In a similar fashion to navigator.sendBeacon, the “ping” attribute fulfills the request in the background, thus it’s not suspcentible to common document unloading problems when sending requests..
Any sense of browser support?
I remember hearing about this many years ago (I think the last draft of specs to include it were in 2010, and it hasn’t been included since), but browser support was iffy. I think FF allows it only if the user modifies their about:config, there’s no real push for IE support, and Chrome/webkit supposedly support it but that’s not enough to recommend it’s use when it’s not on track to become a spec.
It was meant to be used primary for analytics and tracking, for the reasons Adam mentions (the request wouldn’t get canceled by the navigation itself).
It is designed for advertisers. The idea is to have a banner ad that links to the advertiser while having a click tracker go to the ad supply company without having to ad 3rd party JS that who knows what it does.
Since this is designed for advertisers, Google obviously has it working in Chrome, but Firefox doesn’t really care. Because of this, the ad industry just makes the click through url hit the ad supply site for tracking and then it redirects you to the actual ad url.
Just see that Google use it on results search links