12 ms·

Webmention

98 points by Rifu 11y ago

eps 11y ago
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 11y ago
  http://indiewebcamp.com/Vouch http://indiewebcamp.com/Vouch is an extension to prevent that
  - eps 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.
ehnto 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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.
- jeena 11y ago
  There is a extension to webmentions linked from the W3C page which handles that problem http://indiewebcamp.com/Vouch http://indiewebcamp.com/Vouch
- epeus 11y ago
  Referrer spamming is significantly else effort than this, and the validation of the target link in the source does provide a higher barrier. Parsing for microformats from the source also gives more structure to validate heuristically. Eventually a whitelist model will make more sense; the 'vouch' extension gives a way to construct one which puts more burden on the spammer than the receiver.
oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
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
santiagobasulto 11y ago
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.
VoxPelli 11y ago
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/
perlgeek 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    > 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 11y ago
      Yeah, the plumbing is not very different to pingback, just a bit easier to use, the big difference is the UI.
onli 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
alistproducer2 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
  - detaro 11y ago
    Where does this spec have anything that requires code in a browser? It's purely a server-to-server protocol, to be implemented by blog engines, CMS or third party services like disqus, ... (And has nothing to do with "the HTML specification" either)
  - epeus 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.
- tommorris 11y ago
pc2g4d 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Could do, but you'd still have to validate it.
  - pc2g4d 11y ago
    Good point

98 points by Rifu 11y ago

eps 11y ago

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 11y ago
http://indiewebcamp.com/Vouch http://indiewebcamp.com/Vouch is an extension to prevent that
- eps 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.

ehnto 11y ago

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 11y ago
> 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.
jeena 11y ago
There is a extension to webmentions linked from the W3C page which handles that problem http://indiewebcamp.com/Vouch http://indiewebcamp.com/Vouch
epeus 11y ago
Referrer spamming is significantly else effort than this, and the validation of the target link in the source does provide a higher barrier. Parsing for microformats from the source also gives more structure to validate heuristically. Eventually a whitelist model will make more sense; the 'vouch' extension gives a way to construct one which puts more burden on the spammer than the receiver.

oneeyedpigeon 11y ago

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

santiagobasulto 11y ago

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.

VoxPelli 11y ago

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/

perlgeek 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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 11y ago
    Yeah, the plumbing is not very different to pingback, just a bit easier to use, the big difference is the UI.

onli 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

alistproducer2 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.
- detaro 11y ago
  Where does this spec have anything that requires code in a browser? It's purely a server-to-server protocol, to be implemented by blog engines, CMS or third party services like disqus, ... (And has nothing to do with "the HTML specification" either)
- epeus 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
tommorris 11y ago

pc2g4d 11y ago

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 11y ago
Could do, but you'd still have to validate it.
- pc2g4d 11y ago
  Good point