Webmention and Anchors

I see that in the draft webmention spec an implementation must preserve the
query string but no mention is made about anchors.

In particular I was interested in the use case of lightweight notification
of comment replies which usually occur many to a page.

If the text in 3.12 was modified so that if URL=foourl#anchor then only the
descendants of #anchor in HTML were searched for an <a> or <link> element
with rel=“webmention” this could be usefully used as a comment reply
notification.

In such a use case each comment (on say a blog) would allow the user to
enter a webmention url which would be added (but not necessarily displayed)
to the displayed comment.  Any reply to a comment could then include a link
to it’s parent (or parents) so a conforming implementation could trigger a
webmention to inform the parent poster of the reply.

(Yes, I realize ActivityPub or some other pub/sub architecture would no
doubt handle a richer version of notification but it is also far more
complex.)

Anyway there may be good reasons the draft doesn’t allow this but I figured
I would throw the question/use-case out there.

Peter

P.S. Am I misreading the draft or does it allow only a single url to be
notified via webmention for each link in a post?  In other words I can’t
decide that I want both service A and service B to recieve a webmention
whenever someone links to my homepage.  Is there any reason for this
restriction?

Received on Tuesday, 4 April 2017 09:42:32 UTC