hebig.org/blog

Ian Hickson: Whitepaper: Pingback vs Trackback "It seems pingback has caused quite a stir in the Web logging and syndication communities! The spec is barely a week old and already I'm seeing pingbacks on sites of people I've never heard of, so implementations are spreading, which is great. It also seems pingback has acted a little like a kick in the backside to the trackback folk, causing them to work on the transparency side of trackback, which is good to see too."

BEN: TRANSPARENCY NOT AN ISSUE, AUTODISCOVERY IN MT 2.5
MT's Ben: "There is nothing inherent in TrackBack that makes it any less transparent to either of the users involved (and conversely, nothing inherent in pingback that makes it more transparent). The transparency is completely a function of the content management system, not of the specification." And: "[Extracting all external links and auto-discover the corresponding TrackBack URLs is a good idea to start out with.] So I've thrown together some code to do this, and we'll be adding it to the 2.5 version of Movable Type (with a setting to turn the auto-discovery on and off). The auto-discovery was easy, since we're already doing that for the threading tool. Nothing in TrackBack itself [had to be changed] to make the process of sending a ping transparent."

PINGBACK? TRACKBACK?
What's the difference between Pingback and Trackback anyway? Phil Ringnalda: "I've avoided saying anything about PingBack until now, since I like and respect the people who've developed it, but it is *not* TrackBack. When you send a TrackBack ping, you are saying 'I responded to this, and I think that your readers would also like to read what I said.' You are leaving a remote comment. When you send a PingBack ping, you are saying 'I linked to you', nothing more. It's a 'show referrers' script that filters out non-weblog referrers, a way to avoid having to click your own links to be sure you send a referrer. It is *not* TrackBack."

As a demonstration what TrackBack can do, I really liked TrackBack at OSCON, aggregating OSCON-related postings by subject: people posted on their own blogs, and notifications of their entry appeared transparently on this site, making it a virtual forum, a place for collected disussion.

GATEWAYS
Ian Hickson's Pingback-Proxy includes a simple trackback-to-pingback proxy that accepts Trackback GET requests and relays them to a pingback server and a simple pingback-to-trackback proxy that accepts pingback requests and relays them to a trackback server. Of course, putting a Pingback ping into Trackback format doesn't make it a full-featured Trackback ping: "Trackback is a more complex thing."