Re: WebMention Protocol

On 8 May 2013 00:53, Sandeep Shetty <sandeep.shetty@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?
>

I just mean that HTTP lends itself well to improving trust incrementally.
In a general sense you can start with base HTTP and layer trust on top.
PKI is just one of many ways to do this, if it's needed.


>
> 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.
>

Looks great.  I also joined indieweb last year after meeting Tantek at
TPAC.  Maybe we can get some cross communication going between some
indieweb instances, my-profile, openlink, lorea ... and maybe soon (among
others) cozycloud.


>
> 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.
>

Incremental approach is the way to go imho.  The advantage is that you get
a chance to dogfood, test and improve.  The slight disadvantage is that you
may need to refactor slightly later, if you change your 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
>