With my current webmention implementation being rather stable now I think I’ll set a new goal for the project: I want it to also support comments as defined on the IndieWeb wiki. With this extension to the protocol the target of a mention checks the content of the source for additional information about the content in order to display it like a classic “comment” at the target URL.
This has implications for the receiver and the sender of a mention.
The sender/source
The actual webmention itself looks exactly the same but the document that is available at the source has to have some specific characteristics in order to be recognised as comment. A slightly slimmed down version of these requirements for a source document includes these:
- It has to have a h-entry.
- Ideally, that h-entry should hold an in-reply-to URL so that the target knows if it was just mentioned or if the source is meant as a comment to the target.
- It should contain either an e-content or p-summary element that is “not too long” and that should then be displayed by the target.
These are all things I will have to include in my Hugo setup. At this point, I think, I’m going to just add another parameter to posts that are meant as comments which points to the page I want to comment and render that link according to the comment-rules described above. If time permits, I want to get this done over the course of the next couple of days.
The receiver/target
Since I also want to render comments on zerokspot.com, I will have to extend the content parser inside webmentiond and add more microformat2 support. Or (more likely) I will finally give willnorris/microformats a try 😅 In any case, the Mention struct will probably gain a couple of new fields:
ContentAuthorNameAuthorURLAuthorImageType
In the case of a comment, the Type will probably simply be comment to distinguish it from a “normal” mention.
I have no idea yet when I will get around implementing this. I hope, though, it won’t take me too long to get this into webmentiond. I really want it now that I’ve seen comments in the wild 😅
Do you want to give me feedback about this article in private? Please send it to comments@zerokspot.com.
Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂