TrackBack and Noteworthy.

More noteworthy thinking in the realm of TrackBack and simple RESTful interfaces. Scott Andrew writes:

I think, eventually, the TrackBack notification format should supplant the weblogs.com ping format. Why? Although weblogs.com sports a plain vanilla HTTP POST interface, the implementations in weblog software are overwhelmingly RPC-based. This is not as good as it could be, because it means that endpoints other than weblogs.com need to use XML-RPC libraries to parse incoming pings.

And for what? Two lousy pieces of data. Compare this to the POST-based TrackBack format and the far richer data it contains.

I agree Scott. This is an excellent demonstration of the issues Sam Ruby and I have written about. Its also another potential use for the concept of TrackBack and its versitility.

Scott continues:

But a TrackBack isn't the same as an update notification. TrackBack creates a relationship from one post to another post on another weblog, or posts across categories. To my knowledge, no weblog software emits a non-contextual, TrackBack-compatible update notification.

This is partial true in that weblog software currently does not support said behavior. That said it doesn't have to be that way. Using XML::TrackBack it would be trivial to create an application. (Is this a LazyWeb post is disguise?)

Via Phil Ringnalda I've happened upon Mark Paschel's TBPY. Mark explains:

TBPY is a Trackback server CGI for the rest of your site. Rather than accepting pings for numbered weblog entries, it accepts pings for pages of your static or dynamically generated web site. Invoke TBPY through SSI to include your pages' Trackbacks and the appropriate RDF for automatic Trackback discovery, or include the RDF (static) and Trackbacks (through RSS files) yourself.

Excellent! This is exactly what I meant in my posts to the Blogger developers list earlier this month. It also demonstrates PingBack advocates criticism of TrackBack requiring a seperate ID as flawed as I stated in this recent post.

Interesting developments continue to unfold.