Third (and final?) idea for TrackBack and XHTML validation
I certainly hope that this is my final proposal for dealing with the fact that the RDF that TrackBack inserts into pages breaks XHTML validation. After sleeping on yesterday’s rather silly Javascript solution, I don’t much like it. Not only was I wrong about where the MT bookmarklet is getting the RDF (it doesn’t use Javascript to parse the page – instead, your MT installation gets the page and looks through the source), it’s just not a very elegant longterm solution. However, today’s idea seems like a reasonable solution to me.
In a nutshell: support two ways of generating/finding the RDF: either the existing format of embedding it in the XHTML (which is necessary for things like a third-party Blogger implementation, since you can’t generate additional files from Blogger), or by generating separate “foo-tb.rdf” files for each file that you want to be TrackBackable, which will only contain the RDF, and will be discoverable through a <link rel=”trackback-rdf” type=”application/rdf+xml” href=”foo-tb.rdf” /> in the <head> of the page. Then, your MT bookmarklet can get the href from the link, and pass it to MT, which only needs to get the RDF file, rather than the whole XHTML file. No link? The bookmarklet passes a blank for the url, and MT knows it has to get the XHTML and look for embedded RDF. Not using TrackBack? Your bookmarklet will have been generated to not look for the link or pass it (blank or not), so MT knows you don’t care about TrackBack and doesn’t look for anything at all.
Will there ever be RSS/RDF in (X)HTML and have it validate?
There have been complaints/worries that MovableType’s RDF data inserted into HTML files makes the HTML un-validatable (that can’t be a real word). Someone else had the idea to put RSS in XHTML for ’one file
While you were out
Dave Winer quit smoking after surviving heart bypass surgery. I’m not doing anything overt to kill myself now. L’Chaim! Shelley Powers quit blogging. And so begins the great weblog crash of 2002. She will be missed. Movable Type 2.2
Attempt #1 @ trackbacking
phil ringnalda dot com: Third (and final?) idea for TrackBack and XHTML validation Phil posted some instructions at the MT forum to teach us about trackbacking archives instead of pages with numerous entries. Well this one’s certainly a good one…