PingBack
I've been following the development of PingBack with interest [via Simon] because I am unwilling to implement TrackBack in this space. It seems like a good system, but it requires my page to be invalid. And this page validates.
The really cool thing about PingBack is that it is transparent to the users (that is, the linker and the linkee). It's all done automatically, making liberal use of the link tag and XML-RPC. Awesome.
September 04, 2002 - 04:42 PM
Comments and Trackbacks
Um, what makes your page fail to validate if you use Pingback? The only thing you have to add to your page is the link tag pointing to your XML-RPC server — that doesn’t invalidate a page, does it?
Ah, this is because you’re using XHTML. You need to close all tags in XHTML, as you may know, so your link tag should be (note the terminating slash).
Oops. It should be , I mean.
The spec is going to be clarified on this point. I understand your concerns - my site is XHTML as well, so I’ve used the pingback link element with a trailing slash.
There’s a whole load of PingBack discussion going on on the blogite mailing list at the moment - you can join in by signing up, details on www.aquarionics.com a few days ago.
http://www.aquarionics.com/misc/blogite/ in fact :-)
I meant to say that TrackBack seems to force invalidation. PingBack doesn’t seem to have that shortcoming, which is what made it so attractive to me in the first place.
Plus, of course, the fact that it’s automatic. That’s cool as hell.
AJS