Scenario: Trackbacks

[As a preliminary aside, I note that this page:
http://philringnalda.com/blog/2002/06/a_pox_on_validations_house.php
which talks about the problem of RDF in XHTML for trackbacks -- and includes 
embedded RDF (html/body/div/RDF) -- is said to be valid?! How can that be?
http://validator.w3.org/check/?uri=http%3A//philringnalda.com/blog/2002/06/a_pox_on_validations_house.php
]

A trackback is [1] """a framework for peer-to-peer communication and 
notifications between web sites. The central idea behind TrackBack is the 
idea of a TrackBack ping, a request saying, essentially, ``resource A is 
related/linked to resource B.'' A TrackBack ``resource'' is represented by 
a TrackBack Ping URL, which is just a standard URI.""" Trackback methods 
can be "auto-discovered" by other blog clients, """TrackBack clients need a 
method of determining the TrackBack Ping URL for a particular URL or weblog 
entry. Server implementations should include embedded RDF in the pages they 
produce; the RDF represents metadata about an entry, allowing clients to 
auto-discover the TrackBack Ping URL". So an RDF statement is associated 
with a URL (of the "page"), or URL+frag_id (of the "entry" if there is more 
than one on a page).

[1] http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mttrackback.html

The requirements that this speaks to IMHO are:
o expressivity: FLAT, the present statement is a very simple set of 
property/values over the trackback blog entry (it's URI, title, and it's 
trackback URI). It doesn't appear anything more complex will be needed.
o format: RDF, the present syntax is RDF/XML, though I'm not sure this was 
absolutely necessary.
o scope: PARTS of XHTML, this is the only scenario I've seen where folks are 
treating "entries on a page" as distinct resources that need to be 
annotated and described in RDF. However, I'm not quite sure as this is 
proper RDF or Web Architecture? Whatever that means, but my concern is that 
there are no semantics defined for chunks of an XHTML document -- and how 
to annotate them -- and frag_id's are not part of a URI, but a "view" on 
the absoluteURI or relativeURI? 
o authoring RDF: should be done by the blog tool
o validation XHTML: it'd be good if the host page is validatable XHTML.
o compatibility: the trackback should not be rendered.

Received on Monday, 9 June 2003 17:30:40 UTC