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Brent Strange's thoughts on Software Quality Assurance and technology

 
Sunday, January 22, 2006
 
 

FireFox adds Ping attribute to the Anchor tag

 
 

It appears that FireFox 1.6 will have an additional attribute added to the Anchor tag called "Ping". This feature will let the browser send a notification ping to the URL specified for the Ping attribute. The intent of the attribute is to improve page load performance and provide sites a mechanism for link tracking.

I don't know about you, but when I put my evil QA hat on I'm thinking that this could be a nice little feature that could gain me more pings/hits to my site. If I set the ping attribute to qainsight.net for every link I put on my page, I could get an extra hit for link clicked; more hits equals more Google Adsense revenue... Okay, the hat is off now, the evil Brent is gone (I won't be doing that).

I haven't installed FireFox 1.6 to test this but I'm imagining my evil code would look something like this:

<a href="http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/darin/archives/009594.html" ping="http://qainsight.net">Link to Fried Fish</a>

Can you think of any other exploits?