phil ringnalda

You know how when you were a kid, and you had to clean your room on a sunny day when you would rather be outside, so you just cleaned it by stuffing everything under the bed or in the closet, where Mom wouldn’t see it? After all, if she doesn’t see it, she doesn’t have a problem with it. That’s my new approach to validating the TrackBack RDF data.

We need the RDF to be available in two ways: it has to be available to Javascript, so that the bookmarklet can pick it up and let you automatically add a ping while posting, and for future development, it should be available to programs that might come trolling for it. I doubt that anyone is crazy enough to write a program that extracts it by trying to run (X)HTML pages through an XML parser, so at least until nobody ever publishes anything but completely valid XML, it only really needs to be accessible to a regular expression matching the source. So, as a stopgap measure until we can come up with something better, there’s <$MTEntryTrackbackScriptData$>, which produces RDF inside a series of Javascript document.writes. Stop laughing. The code is really ugly, since I don’t really get Perl, so if someone wants to clean it up I’d be happy to see version 2, but this does work.

First, click your TrackBack enabled bookmarklet on this page, and note that it finds TrackBack urls to ping. Then, scroll down to the bottom of the sidebar, and click the XHTML 1.0 icon, and verify that this page validates. Then, download EntryTrackbackScriptData.zip and unzip it. If you don’t already have a plugins directory in your mt directory (the plugins directory should be in the same directory with mt.cgi), create it, and then upload EntryTrackbackScriptData.pl to the plugins directory. Replace <$MTEntryTrackbackData$> with <$MTEntryTrackbackScriptData$> in your templates, and rebuild. If all that DTD writing didn’t fry my brain, you should have working TrackBack data that’s hidden from the validator. Programmers whose regexp will have to match a ‘); at the end of every line: I’m sorry. It’s the best thing I can come up with, for now.