Re: WebMention Protocol

Hey Melvin,

> There's one way to add trust it if you use SSL because HTTP style requests
> (over curl, ajax, wss or web) are designed to allow you to include your
> public key.

Do you mean including the clients public key in the request?

WebMention is meant to be easy to implement and simple to host on
commodity hosting (given it's indieweb [1] context). I've explicitly
tried to keep it crypto free at least from the client programming
perspective. Aaron's lib [2] is current ~200 lines with no
dependencies and a lot of it is just the verbosity of using the PHP
cURL lib.

After spending some time looking at various ways to add the social
layer to indieweb, I've come to favour simple, focused, "good enough"
solutions that do one thing only. In the case of WebMention, it is to
notify a resource that it was (publicly) mentioned somewhere. The
expectation is that you can extend it out-of-band. For example, with
"The First Federated #Indieweb Comment Thread" [3], Laurent's site
(the target) automatically parsed Aaron's reply's (the source) h-entry
microformat markup to retrieve its text, permalink, datetime of
publication, and authorship information. I'm guessing you could use a
similar mechanisms to retrieve a public "message body" but it depends
on what you have in mind.


1. http://indiewebcamp.com
2. https://github.com/aaronpk/mention-client
3. http://tantek.com/2013/113/b1/first-federated-indieweb-comment-thread

--
Sandeep Shetty

Received on Tuesday, 7 May 2013 22:54:38 UTC