Re: standardizing webmention

On 14 July 2015 at 13:12, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:

> there has been some talk about standardizing webmention as part of the
> work of this WG
>
> a few comments
>

Just wanted to follow up on this post from July last year:


>
> 1. I think webmention would really benefit from having a normative stable
> document -- when doing a search on the web there are many places you can be
> lead to, and it's really hard for a developer to know they are in the right
> place (eg webmention.org, webmention.net, indieweb wiki)
>

This is now done, great, thanks!  I'm impressed with the hard work aaron
has put in to document this.

I would say that most of the issues I originally raised have made good
progress, I've added some points on the github after reviewing the latest
spec.

The main interoperability issue I would say at this point, is that it's not
using JSON (at least not in the examples), which is what I think everyone
in the group (with perhaps 1-2 exceptions) were prepared to compromise on,
and is stated in the charter.

>
>
> 2. writing up webmention as a w3c note should not be a hard job ... it's a
> pattern that was being used 10 - 20 years ago ... for those not familiar,
> my understanding is it's a simple 2 parameter query string (ie source and
> target)
>
> 3. I am very impressed with what has been done with such a simple tech but
> I dont think it scales for a number of reasons which I'll point out:
>
> 4. webmention is a call by reference type function, whereas most functions
> allow both call by reference and call by value.  So when say activity pump
> sends a serialized activity stream, webmention would fail.
>
> 5. webmention objects dont return URIs, this violates web axioms, where
> everything of note should have a URI
>
> 6. webmention is not extensible over and beyond the source and target
> parameters, which is problematic for any extra kind of data
>
> 7. webmention is not namespaces, preventing both open ended scalability,
> but also it's hard to translate source and target into URIs ... would
> should they be?  urn:source and urn:target ... any suggestion here is
> problematic.
>
> 8 webmention does not accept the mime types being standardized in this
> group for a JSON based serialization
>
> Other than that I think it's an incredibly useful technology.  That can
> solve some but not all of the user stories and patterns this group is
> working on.  I dont think it can be a basis for a REC track social web API
> (I could be wrong there!) but im very excited about what is being done with
> it, at least as proof of concept, and would love to see something more
> official from the group on it, if that is considered appropriate -- mainly
> I think there would be a easily findable stable reference to the spec.
>