From: Aquarion (nicholas@aquarionics.com)
Date: Wed Sep 11 2002 - 11:11:00 BST
On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 09:06:47PM +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
>
> On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Aquarion wrote:
> > > >
> > > > 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)
> > >
> > > That's a non-trivial advantage.
> >
> > For HTML documents, I'd agree. For documents that cannot display the
> > resulting information (text files, videos, basically most things that
> > arn't X/HTML) having the information recorded seperatly isn't worth it.
>
> Out of band recording of this information (using HTTP headers like:
>
> Link: <http://www.example.net/>; rel="related",
> <http://www.example.org/article/32>; rel="related"
>
> ....) is quite possible whatever the format of the document.
>
>
> Anyway, your arguments seem more directed towards the use of X-Pingback on
> documents other than blogs, rather than towards X-Pingback itself. Are you
> against the header itself, despite its advantages? (Easy parsing, no need
> to get more than the head of the document, and its possible applicability
> to blogs in non-HTML formats.)
I'm against adding arbiary information to http headers, because it
follows a trend I'm directly opposed to, and one that - if followed -
would negate all those advantages. Pingback is, from my perspective,
something to do with the content of a page, rather than the serving of
the page itself.
Secondly, from my perspective it is pointless. Yes, grabbing the head is
faster, but not enough to justify it. For example:
Example one, someone uses the X-Pingback:
Open connection.
Get head.
Parse head for X-Pingback.
Suceed. link. Yay.
Example two: Someone is using the <link> (Which I suspect will be the
most popular idea)
Open Connection
Parse Head
Fail
Open connection, read each line:
if I find link, succeed, Drop connection, Yay.
Or:
Read next line.
(Read fifty lines || EOF) drop connection.
Example Three: Ignoring X-Pingback.
Open connection, read each line:
if I find link, succeed, Drop connection, Yay.
Or:
Read next line.
(Read fifty lines || EOF) drop connection.
(Which is what I'm doing now. The In Production version scans for
"X-Pingback" as it's looking for <link>)
My problem with the header is that the advantages it brings do not
outweigh the disadvantages, which is that if I try to take advantage of
the advantages, it makes the "standard" method take longer, and that it
involves playing with either headers or server configs, neither of which
an ordinary web-page should have to do.
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