Webmention is a
W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...
recommendation that describes a simple protocol to notify any URL when a website
links to it, and for web pages to request notifications when somebody links to them. Webmention was originally developed in the
IndieWebCamp IndieWebCamp is a technology BarCamp that was founded in Portland, Oregon and has since been held all over the world, including at the offices of the ''New York Times'' and in Brighton, England. It describes itself as a 2-day creator camp focused ...
community
and published as a
W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...
working draft on January 12, 2016. As of January 12, 2017 it is a W3C recommendation.
Webmention enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, referring to, or commenting on their articles. By incorporating such comments from other sites, sites themselves provide
federated commenting functionality.
Similar to
pingback A pingback is one of four types of linkback methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Some weblog softwar ...
, Webmention is one of four types of
linkback
A linkback is a method for Web authors to obtain notifications when other authors link to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to, their articles. The four methods ( refback, trackback, p ...
s, but was designed to be simpler than the
XML-RPC
XML-RPC is a remote procedure call (RPC) protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism.Simon St. Laurent, Joe Johnston, Edd Dumbill. (June 2001) ''Programming Web Services with XML-RPC.'' O'Reilly. First Edition. ...
protocol that
pingback A pingback is one of four types of linkback methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Some weblog softwar ...
relies upon, by instead only using
HTTP
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...
and x-www-urlencoded content.
Beyond previous linkback protocols, Webmention also specifies protocol details for when a page that is the source of a link is deleted, or updated with new links or removal of existing links.
See also
*
Pingback A pingback is one of four types of linkback methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Some weblog softwar ...
, the
XML-RPC
XML-RPC is a remote procedure call (RPC) protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism.Simon St. Laurent, Joe Johnston, Edd Dumbill. (June 2001) ''Programming Web Services with XML-RPC.'' O'Reilly. First Edition. ...
based protocol that Webmention was modeled after.
*
Refback A refback is one of four types of linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles.
A Refback is simp ...
, a similar protocol but easier than Pingbacks since the site originating the link doesn't have to be capable of sending a Pingback request.
*
Trackback, a similar protocol but more prone to
Sping
Sping is short for " spam ping", and is related to pings from blogs using trackbacks, called trackback spam. Pings are messages sent from blog and publishing tools to a centralized network service (a ping server) providing notification of newly pu ...
(Trackback spam) since there is no authentication or verification possible with Trackbacks.
References
World Wide Web Consortium standards
Blogs
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