Think this through for me, wudja?
I’ve had Seth Dillingham’s post about TrackBack, along with his ping to my entry and email, sitting around waiting for my brain to tell me it’s sharp enough to think things through for going on ten days now, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe instead of being sick I’ve just become permanently stupid. Could you please think it through, and tell us whether or not switching from (commented out) RDF to just a Technorati tag-style link for TrackBack autodiscovery would be a good thing? From what I’ve seen from the RDF-in-HTML Working Group, there will never be a direct solution that just lets us take the comments off, so it’s either GRDDL or whatever the (X)HTML Working Group is up to for XHTML 2.0 if we want to maintain some tenuous relationship with RDF, or just a link with a slightly hacky rel if we don’t.
First, dump trackback!
There, now that this is out of my system, I am a little concerned about the use of the rel attribute for any and all ”want something in XHTML that validates” situations. If we continue along this path, we’re going to bring back BLINK, and I’ll have to jump off a cliff.
But the use of RDF for trackback autodiscovery never made much sense. After all, there is no ’meaning’ inherent with knowing how to have your machine talk back to my machine.
What is the value of knowing this information, this link to use for trackbacking? Is it of use in an of itself apart from its participation in a purely mechanical process?
I tried to play on this a bit when trackback came out, when I was still flirting with Threadneedle, but in the end the big piece that’s missing in the centralized pool of links, and Technorati provided that, not trackback.
Anyway, that’s my opinion for what it’s worth. Because I’m a woman in technology and by gol, I have an opinion!
(sorry, wrong topic. But I’m kinda on a roll.)
I hope you feel better soon. Will post you a photo of a purple crocus to cheer you up.