It’s just data

First impressions on Pingback

I've started to take a look at pingback.  My first impressions are that it will take more lines of code to implement and will provide less value than trackback.  More on that when I complete my analysis.  Meanwhile, a few reactions to Hixie's whitepaper on the subject... I did not mean to imply that referrers are enough, all I meant to say was to those who did not appear to want to have two way linkages that they already had them.  All pingbacks and trackbacks attempt to change the signal to noise ratio.  Also trackback metadata can be stored in HTML comments, partially invalidating the flexibility and standards compliant issues identified in the whitepaper.

If they're commented out then they can hardly be considered part of the page's metadata -- I mean, it's like saying that if the page contains:

<!-- <title> Foo </title> -->

...the title of the page is Foo. It's not.


I would be interested to see which (pingback or trackback) is harder to implement. Having implemented both, I'd have to say that Pingback was easier for me, but I think the real reason for that is mainly that the spec is clearer -- I kept running into edge cases that the trackback spec didn't define. On the technical side I found Trackback only slightly more complicated than Pingback.

Posted by Ian Hickson at

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