
Webmention - Rifu
https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/WD-webmention-20160112
======
onli
I was very annoyed the last time I looked at this.

Webmentions are like trackbacks, but trackbacks that do not contain the
information needed to show them, instead relying on the receiving party to
fetch that information from a microformat (that part seems to be missing from
the spec).

What annoyed me so much that I opted to not implement it in any of those blog
engines I'm involved in is that it is a useless re-invention of trackbacks.
There is no point in webmentions, not one feature that could not be done with
trackbacks as well. They have a wikipage arguing against trackbacks on
[https://indiewebcamp.com/Trackback](https://indiewebcamp.com/Trackback), and
all points on that page are wrong when looking at how blog engines actually
implement trackbacks. Just take the first, fragile discovery: The critic is
that the RDF comment needed for Trackbacks is is complex and get stripped. But
frankly, it is not complex to grep for it and if you can't control your own
page HTML to preserve comments, you have different problems (and one that
could hit your microformat equally). More important: Trackbacks actually can
be found via a rel-tag in the site head exactly like pingbacks (and I guess
webmentions), rel=trackback.

And of course blog engines verify that the origin really has a link to the
receiving page, the spam problem is solved there exactly like with
webmentions.

What should be done is to take trackbacks and formalize the current solutions
and extensions into a formal protocol. There is no need to willfully cut out
the existing independent web, as in blogs, for a hipster indieweb movement.

I guess I'm still annoyed.

~~~
pmlnr
Do you use Trackbacks? Do you know anyone, who still uses Trackbacks? When
what the last time you received a non-spam trackback?

Because webmentions are alive. Sometimes you need to re-visit and re-pack
things to bring them back again.

~~~
onli
I use trackbacks, since my chosen blog engine (serendipity) supports them. I
know a number of other bloggers and they all use trackbacks. My last non-spam
trackback came in on Nov 9 2015, 08:02, ignoring the ones I sent to myself (I
was not very active in the meantime).

Trackbacks are alive as well. But yes, they should be revisited and
repackaged, I agree that they could need a popularity boost. But that is
possible without breaking compatibility for no reason.

~~~
pmlnr
Yes, Trackbacks or Pingbacks could have been extended to include a similar
pull-parse behaviour as webmentions are doing right now.

In fact I was reminded that originally webmentions were on top of pingbacks:
[http://tantek.com/2013/113/b1/first-federated-indieweb-
comme...](http://tantek.com/2013/113/b1/first-federated-indieweb-comment-
thread)

As far as I understand that change is mostly for simplification, which always
a good thing.

~~~
onli
Being on top of pingbacks makes no sense, xml-rpc is dead and a bad idea in a
first place, also a lot harder to implement than just reacting to a ping +
pretty much incompatible with the pull concept. If they started there, they
probably did not know trackbacks existed.

Webmentions are no simpler than trackbacks, and to have them diverge for no
reason makes everything more complicated for the engine. It is no straight-
forward simplification at all, thus no good thing.

------
VoxPelli
Examples of tools, libraries and sites that make use of this standard can be
found on:
[http://indiewebcamp.com/webmention](http://indiewebcamp.com/webmention)

I'm eg. myself running a service that makes it simple to accept WebMentions on
something like a static blog:
[https://webmention.herokuapp.com/](https://webmention.herokuapp.com/)

------
santiagobasulto
I remember I read something similar in Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators"
book. When the internet was just starting, Tim Berners-Lee was faced with the
decision of made linking "public" or "private". So basically they considered
for a while that an <a> tag should be somehow "authorized" in order to exist.
Of course this didn't roll out (thankfully).

Sorry if something is not 100% right, it's what I remember.

------
oneeyedpigeon
There's a useful summary on the wikipedia page for 'Linkback' [1] describing
how Webmention differs from other similar schemes.

Things like Pingback and Trackback seemed to be all the rage for a few months,
back in the day. They then seemed to cease being talked about - either
discussion has bypassed me, or they just carry on being used, seamlessly, or
they've failed. It would be great to see something like this really take off,
though, especially since many bloggers started turning off comments.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback)

------
ehnto
I really wish this sort of thing were still usable on our modern web. This
will be hijacked by spammers and it will become impossible to see legitimate
mentions through the sea of spam, but it sure is a nice interface for building
up a network of backlinks.

Just like Google Analytics has become useless for low traffic sites. My blog
gets hundreds of page views, all from referral spam. I don't even bother
trying to see if at least some real people are looking at it.

~~~
lazyjones
> _but it sure is a nice interface for building up a network of backlinks._

The web isn't static, backlinks tend to disappear. So a one-time effort isn't
useful, especially if it further complicates already bloated browsers and
enables DDoS techniques.

A useful way of collecting backlinks at any point in time would be through
search engines that snapshot all the visible web regularly with timestamps.
It's too bad they don't offer such services anymore.

------
perlgeek
On the technical side, this seems nicer than pingbacks (which uses XML-RPC).

On the user side: dunno. I never found value in pingbacks listed at the bottom
of a blog post, and I doubt that a different technique in the background will
change that profoundly.

~~~
jeena
If the other page uses microformats I'm displaying their content under my
post, like for example:
[https://jeena.net/photos/201](https://jeena.net/photos/201)

I also show the reposts, likes, etc. there, I even aggregate those from
facebook, instagram, twitter, flickr, etc. with help of
[https://brid.gy/](https://brid.gy/) which translates fb, tw, etc. to
microformats and sends a webmention. And I'm getting more and more native
webmentions, but that is most probably because I'm active in that community.

~~~
Walkman
> If the other page uses microformats I'm displaying their content under my
> post, like for example:
> [https://jeena.net/photos/201](https://jeena.net/photos/201)

That is actually really nice!

~~~
jeena
Yeah, the plumbing is not very different to pingback, just a bit easier to
use, the big difference is the UI.

------
pc2g4d
Just thinking out loud here, but... suppose that many/most nodes on the WWW
implement Webmention and publish their knowledge of who links to them. In
other words, the link graph can be navigated in both directions. Does that not
simplify the implementation of pagerank-like algorithms somehow? Could
deployment of such a linking standard make it cheaper to index the web?

Not a fully formed thought.

~~~
tommorris
Could do, but you'd still have to validate it.

~~~
pc2g4d
Good point

------
eps
This is not only susceptible to referrer spamming, but it's also a far more
efficient way to do it. Ultimately it's a inbound channel where all
submissions are nearly guaranteed to be reviewed by the recipient, simply
because that's what it is for.

~~~
jeena
[http://indiewebcamp.com/Vouch](http://indiewebcamp.com/Vouch) is an extension
to prevent that

~~~
eps
This is irrelevant to the case of _referrer_ spamming.

Vouching may help preventing spam from percolating to public-facing pages
through automated mention processing, but it does absolutely nothing to stop
or to discourage referrer spam, which is aimed at the actual owners of the
resource rather than their visitors.

~~~
jeena
What is referrer spamming? You mean people who look at the apache logs or
something? Just don't look there, I don't see the connection between
webmention and referrer.

------
alistproducer2
I'm not really seeing the benefit of putting this in the HTML specification. I
see the use case, but seems to me this should be left to libraries.

~~~
andrewmcwatters
I agree. I feel more and more sorry for browser architects every day. It seems
now more than ever that modern browsers are just kitchen sinks for spec
writers. I'm fully aware some of these spec authors are browser architects
themselves, but cut the fat please.

We'll be stuck with these redundant proposals for decades. Webmentions could
be a fantastic library on its own, though as previously mentioned, we already
have trackbacks. Does it need to be an additional few files in the codebases
of Chromium, Firefox, et al.? No.

~~~
epeus
You're missing the point of standardization - it's not a legislative process
that requires implementation, it's a documentation process to show what has
already been implemented and how you can interoperate with it. Webmention
already has multiple libraries and services implementing it.

~~~
Zikes
And in cases like this, standardization is just about the only way to ensure
the feature's success. If every blog/publishing engine developed their own
proprietary service for tracking linkbacks/mentions, it would likely never get
off the ground at all.

