Re: Interesting page headers (Was: [blogite] Before we update the spec...)

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From: Aquarion (nicholas@aquarionics.com)
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 07:54:14 BST


On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 05:12:07AM +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
>
> On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Aquarion wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 12:17:20AM +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
> > >
> > > On Mon, 9 Sep 2002, Aquarion wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > And ironically no X-Pingback HTTP header! What's this then. :-P
> > > >
> > > > Me, disagreeing with the X-Pingback idea, as noted elsewhere :-)
> > >
> > > Must've missed that, or confused it with the comments from someone else.
> > > How do you propose handling pingback on, e.g., text/plain documents?
> >
> > I don't. I saw - and see - pingback as a tool for webloggers. Making it
> > a general purpose "I linked to you" opens it further to abuse. When it
> > was a way of tracking conversation within the community, I support it.
> > As something that is done better by reading your referal logs, I
> > disagree with it.
>
> People have been linking to the text/plain document on XHTML that I posted
> recently, rather than to the permalink of my blog entry introducing it.
>
> With X-Pingback, I wouldn't have missed those references. I currently
> automatically get an e-mail for each new referrer to my blog. I don't do
> this to other documents on my sites, because I'd get flooded in seconds
> just from the google hits. However, pingbacks are much rarer, since they
> only occur when someone adds a new link.
>
> I still see pingback as being, on the client side, just a blogging tool,
> but I don't see why, on the server side, I shouldn't be able to catch
> links to pages other than my blog entries.

Because everything you get with a pingback - that someone has followed a
link from $reference to $page - is already )and automatically( filed
away in your server log without there being any other protocal involved.
The /only/ benefit pingback has over scanning log files is the permalink
that it gives back to the refering article (that is, When I link from
index.php, the pingback tells you the link comes index.php?id=404,
because that's the place you'll /always/ be able to get it), which
can be used to create a list of "further reading" links. Doing this for
anthing other than x/html isn't as useful, because part of the point of
the system is you have a list of links of people who talked about this.
In a text file, video, or any other /static/ medium you might as well
stick to referer logs.
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