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I was never aware of the ping attribute but now it makes me wonder what was the rationale behind standardising it. Is there any particular legitimate (ie. non-tracking) use for such a feature? It would makes sense, of sorts, if there was a policy regarding the target of the attribute but as far as I can see the browser can ping literally anything.

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The rationale is that everyone interested has been doing this with redirects (for years) in non standardised and often opaque ways.

So it’s better to standardize and make it transparent.

E.g. google search results get rewritten to redirects as soon as you hover over them or press them (and are redirects in the first place with JS off). Have been for at least 8 years now.

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