For the book, I’ve been going through a bunch of web history, re-learning things I had forgotten or missed. Currently reading the Pingback spec from 2002, back when we thought XML-RPC-ing everything was a good idea.
@brentsimmons Some of it was a good idea (especially compared to even more complicated protocols). But Pingback is much harder to implement than Webmention, for example, which is just a couple form-encoded params. I think simple ideas could've had simpler solutions, in hindsight.
@brentsimmons Two reasons:
1: The only data in the Pingback payload is two URLs. Wrapping this an an XML container that's also doing RPC is incredibly overkill for sending just two values. That's why Webmention went with form-encoded instead, like regular HTML forms, which is about the most compact way you can send two values.
2: Pingback never went far enough with the user experience of displaying them. At best, you'd see a snippet of the text near the link, which it turns out wasn't really that useful or contextual. Once social media started taking off, the interactions there became far richer than seeing the pingback excerpt, so people abandoned them. With Webmention, we're explicitly focusing on enabling the kind of rich interactions people do on social media instead.
@aaronpk Reasonable! I liked XML-RPC at the time because my tools made it exactly the same as making a function call. This was wonderful and so amazingly easy.
@manton I was a lower-tie supporter of the kickstarter, so I won’t be getting a printed book, but I’d like to read the book on my Kindle. Will it be for sale on Kindle/Apple 📚 eventually? For those that like to read offline, I mean?
@brentsimmons @aaronpk Great tools made a difference. The downside is an extra dependency for parsing instead of using out-of-the-box web stuff. But I put emphasis around “everything” because it did have its place… And I know we were just talking last week about how cool it was back then! 🙂
@odd It won’t be for sale anywhere else, but I was planning on making an ePub that would work offline. I need to get through the web version first before I figure that out.
@manton If you want .epub, .mobi, or other versions (hardback/paperback) for digital stores or other outlets, feel free to ask. I'm happy to volunteer to help make those pieces work for you if you'd like. Shouldn't be too difficult to process from whatever files you've got. Having/selling physical copies could be an inexpensive, but useful marketing thing for you, particularly when speaking/travelling.
@c Thank you! I think it may be too much of a distraction to sell additional print copies, but we'll see when I'm closer to that point.
@manton Your post reminded me of the time I attended the XMLOne conference in 2001 (my only time yet in Austin, sadly). XML, XSLT and schema parsers were taking over! 😅
@muncman Oh yeah. XML, XLST, and friends were everywhere back then. (Hope you have a chance to visit Austin again sometime!)
