How does webmention avoid username conflicts?
July 21, 2018 8:09 AM   Subscribe

I've been reading about webmention, and there's one peice of it that I can't quite grasp: how does this technology avoid username conflicts? This article at A List Apart describes webmention as "simply an @mention that works from one website to another!" But I see nothing in the W3C spec about how the @ usernames are chosen/registered, etc.

Maybe this is just a glorfied pingback and there are no @usernames? Or maybe I'm missing something?
posted by eustacescrubb to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: It looks to me like the "usernames" are URLs - basically with a Webmention you would @ metafilter.com, or in the case of this question you could @ the specific url of this post. Obviously those are already unique so you don't have to worry about it, and you can set it up so that if you are the owner of a url you can get the notifications and whatnot about people webmentioning your site somewhere else.
posted by brainmouse at 8:15 AM on July 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Yeah, I briefly skimmed through the draft specification and it doesn't refer to usernames anywhere, only URLs.

It seems to work exactly like old-school pingbacks, except that it's simpler to implement because it's built on HTTP GET/POST requests instead of XML-RPC.
posted by teraflop at 8:15 AM on July 21, 2018


Response by poster: Thanks! So it's just that the ALA article is poorly written in that breathless way that articles about new tech often are.
posted by eustacescrubb at 10:20 AM on July 21, 2018


« Older Further suggestions in the Berkshires and Western...   |   Cream in Greek Yogurt? Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.


Tags

Share