Pingback 1.0

Hixie has published the specification for Pingback 1.0. In general the specification is an excellent document, but I’m not entirely happy with the following statement:

HTML and XHTML documents MAY include a <link> element in addition to an HTTP header, although this is discouraged.

Some Pingback clients (in particular bookmarklets, although to my knowledge none have been written yet) are expected to be unable to parse headers—which is the primary reason for including the link element method of auto discovery. I would therefore suggest that anyone wishing to pingback-enable their HTML or XHTML documents should include a Pingback link element in addition to the HTTP header.

Posted 24th September 2002 at 2:04 pm

6 comments

This was Aquarion's complaint as well...
sil - 24th September 2002 14:38 - #
The intention is that documents should contain either one or the other, not that the X-Pingback header is preferred. The reason is to reduce the likelyhood of inconsistencies. Might be something to clarify in an errata though.
Ian Hickson - 24th September 2002 14:46 - #
Incidentally, is pingback support broken in this blog? I didn't get a pingback notification for it. :-(
Ian Hickson - 24th September 2002 15:16 - #
(but I did for the spec, so one of the two links did get pingbacked... odd)
Ian Hickson - 24th September 2002 15:16 - #
I'm not sure what went wrong there. The error message I got was "The server did not return a 200 HTTP status code" but I checked your page with the mozilla.org web-sniffer and it apeared to be sending the 200 code as expected.
Simon Willison - 24th September 2002 16:58 - #
Hrm, maybe there's something intermittently broken on my site. Other people have occasionally mentioned that too, but I can't reproduce it. :-(
Ian Hickson - 24th September 2002 22:11 - #

Comments are closed.

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Pingback 1.0

6 comments