14 DAY TRIAL // The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released a first Public Working Draft of the Webmention specification, something that in theory looks exactly like the WordPress Pingback system.
The concept is simple and tries to put some order in the mess that's currently online when it comes to interconnecting content across different sites.
"Webmention is a simple way to notify any URL when you link to it on your site," the W3C describes the specification's concept. "From the receiver's perspective, it's a way to request notifications when other sites link to it."
According to the standard's preliminary text, Webmention would work via HTTP x-www-form-urlencoded POST requests and would allow a developer to broadcast a ping-like message to a link's author by adding a rel="webmention" attribute inside an HTML link.
On the other side of the line, the link target's author would receive the mention message on his site, and would be able to decide what to do with its content (add as comment, insert in a database, post on Twitter, etc.).
Webmention specification is based on the work of the IndieWeb movement
A few days ago, W3C also made another bold move when it started an initiative to standardize passwordless login systems. For that particular effort, W3C's job was made easier thanks to the FIDO Alliance who donated their FIDO 2.0 Web API to serve as a base for the new API.
Just like in that case, Webmention is also based on a donation, W3C receiving most of the current standard's draft text from the IndieWeb community.
The IndieWeb group describes itself as a conglomerate of authors that want to advance the open Web but without the help of corporate entities like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the rest, who often have been behind W3C standards, or have blocked their advancement.
The Webmention movement received a huge boost at the end of 2014, when Stuart Langridge, creator of the Pingback protocol, placed his support behind the then-experimental technology.