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<a ping="..."> is a relatively new, relatively unknown attribute in HTML5's anchor element.
How cross-browser compliant is it?
I've looked at online sources like MDN and http://caniuse.com, but found nothing that suggest browser support.
I want to know if it's a viable option for link tracking today in 2014.
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a target=”_blank” Open in New Browser Tab (or Window) The target attribute specifies where the linked document will open when the link is clicked.
The ping attribute specifies a list of URLs to be notified if the user follows the hyperlink. When the user clicks on the hyperlink, the ping attribute will send a short HTTP POST request to the specified URL. This attribute is useful for monitoring/tracking.
You just need an anchor ( <a> ) element with three important attributes: The href attribute set to the URL of the page you want to link to. The target attribute set to _blank , which tells the browser to open the link in a new tab/window, depending on the browser's settings.
An anchor is a piece of text which marks the beginning and/or the end of a hypertext link. The text between the opening tag and the closing tag is either the start or destination (or both) of a link. Attributes of the anchor tag are as follows. HREF. OPTIONAL.
The ping attribute was included in pre-W3C drafts of HTML5. It remained in W3C drafts of HTML5 up until early 2010 - the last draft to include it was W3C Working Draft 4 March 2010; the next draft was W3C Working Draft 24 June 2010.
Why was it removed? It was massively unpopular - an HTML feature designed for advertisers to track clicks on adverts. Hixie's argument was that they can already do that; ping just made the process more transparent. And browsers would be able to offer a feature to block ping tracking. The counter-argument to that is that if browsers had this feature, publishers would avoid ping, it being unreliable compared to current click-tracking techniques.
Some browsers support it because of a combination of:
Browsers that support it seem to be Safari and Chrome. (It's no surprise that the latter does; it originally used Safari's WebKit as its layout engine, and now uses Blink, a fork of WebKit.) Firefox also supports it, but since 2008, support has been disabled by default - it can be enabled through about:config, though I don't suppose many people do.
Internet Explorer does not support it (yet?). Opera 12.x does not support the attribute, but I haven't checked in Opera's next generation of Blink-based browsers.
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