3 ms·
I use referrers extensively (see how sites are doing traffic wise, traffic trades etc) so I am definitely glad they exist, but i am always surprised it was ever
by arb99 13y ago
I use referrers extensively (see how sites are doing traffic wise, traffic trades etc) so I am definitely glad they exist, but i am always surprised it was ever added to the spec. think it was added in 1.1 (so 1999). Without it I guess a LOT of sites nowadays would link out with urls like ?from=mysite.com so people knew where traffic was coming from.
It is, like you said, basically a massive privacy hole. But a very handy one
- kijin 13y agoI think search engines like Google should just standardize on a query string like your example. It always works, it's clearly opt-in, it's visible to the user, it's just as straightforward as a header (if not more) for web apps to process, and it's no more spoofable than a header anyway. If you think it's a bad idea to pollute URLs with such things, an alternative would be a URL fragment that is detected by JS.
- toast0 13y agoQuery string wouldn't always work, because the site may already use the query argument for something else; some sites may break or freak out when given unexpected arguments. URL fragments aren't transmitted to the server, so that means you lose referrer analysis for static sites.