[thelist] Is changing window.status='evil?';

[Simon Willison]

At 12:12 31/07/2002 -0500, Joel Konkle-Parker wrote:
>On this note, what about affiliate links? You know, links that say
>"Yahoo!" but
>go to http://www.affiliateserver.com/3872397432987/
>
>Would using a window.status script to say "http://www.yahoo.com/" be valid in
>this situation, since that's where they will actually end up?

That's a very interesting question. I am currently working on a soon-to-be
open source PHP directory script, which allows site owners to arrange a
collection of links in to hierarchical directories (DMOA / Yahoo style).
The script includes the facility to count how many times a link has been
clicked on, by directing all clicks through a redirect.php script that
takes the link ID from the query string, increments the link's hit counter
and redirects the user to the link's URL with Location header.

The downside of this approach is that user's have no way of knowing where
they will end up when they click on a link (the status bar displays
redirect.php?whatever).

My solution at the moment is to use window.status to display the URL that
the user will end up at. However, this leaves no visual clue that a
redirect will occur.

Is this approach acceptable?