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This is one of the more misguided ideas I've seen in a while, if I understand it correctly. The authors seem to expect that web analytics packages are integrat

This is one of the more misguided ideas I've seen in a while, if I understand it correctly. The authors seem to expect that web analytics packages are integrated primarily by javascript snippets, which certainly has some truth to it (i.e. Google Analytics, Omniture, etc.). The problem is, though, that as we look for more analytical data, we end up tossing more and more crap into our web pages and hoping that it can be parsed out and send to some remote analytics service in time before the user does something to leave the page. But maybe I'm jumping the gun here and am missing the point. Perhaps one of the authors can explain the use cases that they have in mind?

jgrahamc 17y ago
The overall idea is that currently there are multiple pieces of JavaScript being used to gather data on web site usage for a variety of reasons (could be web analytics, could be targetting, could be testing). This is wasteful (in terms of page weight) and error prone (n different pieces of code gather the same data and then you end up with a mess of trying to correlate between different products). The obvious solution is a single piece of JavaScript capable of gathering for all products and then sending common data to each of them. That leads you to define common data, hence this standard.