Some clarification to the webmentions discussion

In reply to this analysis by Barnaby Walters of my original article.

Barnaby you wrote:

The evidence is against you here, as almost all known usage of webmention has been for short replies which don’t make sense without context.

Actually we aren’t disagreeing, maybe I didn’t express myself well when I wrote “At the moment of the method is built around a POSSE architecture. This works well for long form articles which can stand alone but address issues or ideas that are posted on an external website”.

What i meant to say is that Indieweb replies make no sense outside their context which makes it counterintuitive to be posting them and displaying them via POSSE. Of course it can be done (and I like the concept) but i doubt it will catch on. Whereas a long form artcicle replying to another doesn’t really need the context as it stands alone.

I agree that webmention is nicer than pingback and your work on the toolbelt is awesome.

With respect to my external comment idea, there is no security hole, most commenting systems allow commenting without logging in and it is up to server on whether it accepts the webmention of the comment posted. Finally like webmentions itself it is a chicken and an egg thing whether PESOS webmentions would catch on. Without modifying existing implemenations it won’t work. I’m slowly getting the hang of Github so I might fork Matthias’ plugin and build it myself if I find the time.