HTML meta referrer: canonical reference
The article provides a comprehensive overview of the HTML meta referrer tag and its implications for web privacy and security. It discusses the historical context of the referrer policy, the valid values it can take, and the default settings in modern browsers. Additionally, it highlights the importance of this directive for developers, marketers, and privacy-conscious site operators.
- ▪The HTML meta referrer tag declares the page level referrer policy, controlling what information is included in the Referer HTTP header.
- ▪There are eight valid values for the referrer policy, with the modern browser default being strict-origin-when-cross-origin.
- ▪The article addresses privacy and security implications, including the risk of URL token leakage and the impact on analytics and affiliate marketing.
DEV.to (Top) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 4,924 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | DEV.to (Top) |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/joseph_anady_214bacedf939/html-meta-referrer-canonical-reference-57eo |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 05:09:25 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T05:37:43.722Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T05:37:43.722Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | -kshd8Jk5c9j |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3948046) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Joseph Anady Posted on May 26 • Originally published at thatdevpro.com HTML meta referrer: canonical reference #html #privacy #webdev #security framework-html-meta-referrer.md Comprehensive reference for HTML <meta name="referrer">, the page level referrer policy declaration.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).
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