HTML5’s rel="noreferrer"

Mark Pilgrim at Dive Into HTML5 (which is supposed to be made into a book in which Google Press is involved in) writes:

rel="noreferrer" “indicates that no referrer information is to be leaked when following the link.” No shipping browser currently supports this, but support was recently added to WebKit nightlies, so it will eventually be showing up in Safari, Google Chrome, and other WebKit-based browsers

There’s also a test case for the noreferrer feature. Looks like a useful value, I wonder if there’s any drawbacks to it. Mark’s site also features a very readable overview on HTML5 forms.

HTML5 is not the only draft standard or proposal around for the future of web markup, but if it will be successful in becoming the main specification then it might mean that torch has been passed on from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG). In that context, it’s worth noting that not only Mark Pilgrim, but also the editor of community-feedback-powered HTML5, Ian Hickson, work at Google – quite a bit of leverage for the browser/ OS/ phone/ search maker, or what do you think?