I emailed IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) earlier today to ask about the new content on example.com. To my surprise, their VP replied. Here is the email: I am happy to try and answer any questions you have. The changes we make to the site from time-to-time are usually informed by a desire to either reduce the overall bandwidth demands of serving the site, or improve its utility. At its heart it is a placeholder...
Yep. I think that’s how it’s always been across all browsers (as long as status codes have existed, anyway). 204 doesn’t produce a document, so the browser stops the navigation. These days such behaviour is described in the HTML spec, and the section begins “Welcome to the dragon’s maw.”
Fun fact: in the past I worked on Chrome’s bounce tracking mitigations, and we managed to generalize our detection algorithm to catch abuses of 204 responses that would silently set tracking cookies. (Did we actually see it happening in practice? I can’t remember. But there was definitely a privacy researcher who posted a POC)
Smallest valid HTML page:
(Title is mandatory in general, though things like HTML email are allowed to omit it.)
But at that point you might as well serve an empty text/plain response.
Or if you really want to cause trouble, a 204 (No Content) response. See how browsers handle it and watch the confusion.
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Oh. I expected to see a blank page, but on Firefox for android tapping that link shows a load bar but then stays on the same page.
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Yep. I think that’s how it’s always been across all browsers (as long as status codes have existed, anyway). 204 doesn’t produce a document, so the browser stops the navigation. These days such behaviour is described in the HTML spec, and the section begins “Welcome to the dragon’s maw.”
score 2 · canonical
Fun fact: in the past I worked on Chrome’s bounce tracking mitigations, and we managed to generalize our detection algorithm to catch abuses of 204 responses that would silently set tracking cookies. (Did we actually see it happening in practice? I can’t remember. But there was definitely a privacy researcher who posted a POC)
score 1 · canonical
oh cool I was wondering if that was going to get fixed
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