Re: Webmention and Anchors

I didn’t initially notice the mention of fragment identifiers in 3.2.1.
However, this text is ambiguous merely saying "Note that a target URL may
contain a fragment identifier, and if the receiver limits which URLs can
receive Webmentions, the fragment *SHOULD* be ignored when checking if the
URL is supported.”

Arguably this implies that using the fragment identifier to determine which
webmentions the reciever will accept so it too implicitly conflicts with
the use I was suggesting.  Not sure

Peter

P.S. Ignore my P.S. on the last post.  The FAQ explained why the spec
doesn’t allow multiple endpoints to be notified for a single link. However,
this explanation doesn’t really hold up.  Resolving a redirect isn’t
particularly cheaper than notifying a (non-redirected) endpoint and if
webmention implementations follow webbrowsers that means ~20 potential
redirects could be chained.

Why not at least ALLOW compliant implementations to notify multiple
endpoints and maybe even require them to notify the first 5?  Sure you
can’t be sure that any implementation will really do that but why not give
them the chance?

P.P.S. In my first post I wrote 3.12 when I should have written 3.1.2.
Sorry.

On Tue, Apr 4, 2017 at 1:20 AM Peter Gerdes <gerdes@invariant.org> wrote:

> 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?
>