Dropping .host-meta from WebSub

Does anyone know of any actual *live* implementations of WebSub (or
PubSubHubbub, any version) that use the .host-meta method of advertising
the hub URL, or any consumers that check for it? I did a bit of looking
around at some of the major players and couldn't find any that did. If you
know of a publisher or consumer that supports it, please share the URL to
it.

To clarify, I'm talking about the third method of Discovery listed here:
https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/#discovery

> publishers may also use the Host-Meta Well-Known URI [RFC6415]
/.well-known/host-meta to include the <Link> element with rel="hub"

We plan to exit CR on 2017-05-11, and if we don't have at least two claims
of implementations of that feature, we'll be dropping it from the spec when
we exit CR. It's important that if any implementations of this feature
exist, we hear about them ASAP.

I did add support to websub.rocks for discovering the hub URL using this
method, and the test suite is now logging whether anyone publishes a URL
that advertises the hub that way, so we'll get a bit of data from that.
However I don't want to waste the time writing tests to check whether
subscribers support this, since there's no evidence of demand for the
feature. I also don't want the presence of the test to cause new
subscribers to have to do the extra work of checking the .host-meta file
just to pass the test suite.

So far, all known WebSub/PubSubHubbub publishers support rel discovery
through the HTTP Link or HTML/XML tags, so there was never any incentive
for subscribers to check the .host-meta as well, so I strongly suspect
there just aren't any subscribers that check for it.

Since this feature is already marked At Risk, the data is strongly pointing
towards dropping it on the 11th.

If this feature is important to you, then please show evidence that it's
been implemented in any form, and I would also highly encourage you to
write a test for it in websub.rocks.

Aaron Parecki
https://aaronparecki.com/

Received on Monday, 1 May 2017 16:54:47 UTC