@thatEmil Taproot works almost the other way round — a “mentions” module stores incoming mentions, noting their target path after resolving redirects. Then, each content module queries the mentions module for mentions of a particular URL. That way the two are decoupled, and I can keep track of mentions of static URLs and things not represented by a “model”. Haven’t figured out how to handle redirects well yet though.

@thatemil AFAIK there’s currently no defined behaviour for HEAD requests to a webmention endpoint, so an empty 405 response is probably the safest bet at the moment.

Webmention spam has already started to become a problem, especially thanks to Brid.gy’s backfeeding of twitter comments. For most of us it hasn’t yet been a big problem, but it inevitably will be in the future. There’s some ideas about potential spam prevention tools on the wiki: indiewebcamp.com/spam

@kartik_prabhu amazing work overall! This is one of my favourite parts though — the fact that fragmention comments fall back gracefully if they’re not supported on either side, and yet all the data required to present them is preserved, so future updates can retro-actively put old marginalia in the right place!

I wonder how tricky it would be to implement this on the comment publisher side too — detecting fragmention URLs and tailoring the reply context content…

@sil @adactio fwiw, pingback was extremely valuable prior art for webmention, the first indieweb comment implementation used pingbacks, and some indieweb sites (my own included) support comments using pingback as the notification transport, often using webmention.io as a proxy

Congratulations Aaron Parecki on implementing real-time #indieweb comments in #p3k using #webmention, websockets, redis, node.js and PHP. Very impressive indeed :)

@sandeepshetty @pfefferle cweiske Something new to consider: Jeremy Keith added a webmention sending form to his journal entries to help people who’s websites don’t support webmention already. Being able to test and use webmention through a human visible, interactable form is a huge benefit of using HTTP form encoded data.

We can make this an even stronger case by encouraging success and error responses to be full HTML documents with helpful copy.

See also

• http://tantek.com/2013/258/t2/web-protocols-should-use-http-params-no-xml
• http://adactio.com/journal/6469/
• http://adactio.com/journal/6495/

cweiske @pfefferle demanding strictly ordered + laid out HTML makes things easier for consumers at the expense of publishers, which is a known anti-pattern. We should optimise for ease of publishing.

Also, many implementations are already parsing the target HTML for reply-contexts (e.g. Aaron Parecki (example), @jschweinsberg (example) and myself (example)), demonstrating that parsing HTML is not a significant barrier.

@benhowdle @trailedapp congrats on the launch! Great that you’re encouraging people to own their comments. Have you come across indiewebcamp.com at all, especially the work we’re doing on cross-site replying, webmentions and reply-contexts? E.G. this post is a reply on my own site to one of your tweets :)

Great work getting webmention set up and your content marked up with microformats!

At the moment of the method is built around a POSSE architecture. This works well for long form articles which can stand alone but address issues or ideas that are posted on an external website.

The evidence is against you here, as almost all known usage of webmention has been for short replies which don’t make sense without context.

But if that is all there is to webmentions it is just a nicer implementation of Pingback.

Pingback succeeded because it was simple. Webmention is even simpler, for good reason.

However the current workflow is awkward and i doubt it will catch on with the general public. Sophisticated Indieweb users can and will read an article on an external site and then return to their own to post a comment, but that king of behaviour is not intuitive.

I absolutely agree! I’m trying various different approaches to making this easier (and making web content more actionable in general), currently I’m using web action toolbelt to really quickly reply to content on other sites. There’s been a lot of discussion about this, and it’s something which everyone can work on as more people start implementing indieweb comments.

I make the comment on the external site and as part of making the comment I add my author url, that being the url of my own site. The external site then sends a webmention of the comment to my site. My own site could then scrapes my comment and saves a copy in my CMS. Otionall  I could republish the comment in my blog or activity feed at my discretion. Thus fully implementing PESOS.

We actually discussed this exact flow at IWCUK 2012, but no-one ever implemented it because, with browser extensions, there’s no need to log in to other people’s sites (complex to implement) and have those sites post to each other (security hole).

Thanks for bringing these issues up, it’s great to have new people join the discussion! I’ll start documenting your points on the Indiewebcamp wiki — it’s there and on the #indiewebcamp IRC room where most discussion takes place.

@jihaisse congratulations on getting #POSSE and #indiecomments working!

sandeepshetty pingback, but Aaron Parecki is sending/accepting webmention (also built a webmention -> pingback proxy) and the rest of us are working on it. General consensus is that it’s way easier than pingback :)