* * * * *
A rabbit hole of webmentions
Webmentions [1].
How hard could it be?
It's relatively straightforward, or so I thought until I started going down
this particular rabbit hole yesterday [2]. The first stumbling block is
sending a webmention. The protocol itself isn't that tough—just send a POST
to an endpoint with the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of my post, and the
URL of the post I mentioned and that's pretty much it. But the issue I have
is that I tend to link freely. This one paragraph post [3] has six links in
it! When I exclude links back to my own blog, there are still three external
links. Do I check each one? There are plenty of posts (like this one [4])
where sending a webmention isn't something I want to do. So I'm having a bit
of analysis paralysis [5] on how exactly I want to handle this. For now, it's
a manual process.
The second issue is one of handling incoming webmentions. I get the incoming
request, I make a bunch of checks, then I have to actually fetch a web page
and therein lies the hook—HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) [6] is rather
involved these days, what with three separate and largely incompatible
versions and TLS (Transport Layer Security) to contend with and … well, I
have some stuff I need to update before I can do all that. So for now, my
webmention endpoint will just accept requests and email me the information.
Maybe if I see just how much this is used in the wild will inform me of how
much work would be involved. I don't know.
[1]
https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/#respecHeader
[2]
https://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/29860.html
[3]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2022/10/19.1
[4]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2021/11/23.1
[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis
[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol
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