July 23, 2003
Trackback explained
What TB does is important to understand. When you use your own personal trackback bookmarklet it sets into action a very interesting series of events.
What the bookmarket code does is open a page to your weblog with a URL to the site you're presently viewing. This is important. That URL is fed to your weblog software and processed BEFORE you ever see a new window. Your weblog pulls up that page, digs out the trackbacks (there may be more than one) and then incorporates them into the form it opens for you. This is profoundly important and fundamentally very different than what most systems in the past have used. It's actually having your weblog server software do some research BEFORE it gives you the form to complete. Now, once you complete the form your weblog server software then also reaches out to the original site and sends it a trackback ping. This ping informs the site that you've posted a message and gives the site a link to it.
I'm of the opinion the same sort of thing
What TB does is important to understand. When you use your own personal trackback bookmarklet it sets into action a very interesting series of events. What the bookmarket code does is open a page to your weblog with a URL to the site you're presently viewing. This is important. That URL is fed to your weblog software and processed BEFORE you ever see a new window. Your weblog pulls up that page, digs out the trackbacks (there may be more than one) and then incorporates them into the form it opens for you. This is profoundly important and fundamentally very different than what most systems in the past have used. It's actually having your weblog server software do some research BEFORE it gives you the form to complete. Now, once you complete the form your weblog server software then also reaches out to the original site and sends it a trackback ping. This ping informs the site that you've posted a message and gives the site a link to it.
I'm of the opinion the same sort of thing is workable for commenting as well. What needs to be considered is that you may or may not want your comments made 'as visible' as a regular trackback. You, personally, want to track where you make comments. You may, however, not want to list those comments on your weblog. Some purists will complain, of course, that you should for some sake of transparency or something. I'm not in disagreement with them but accept that many folks will not want to do this.
So I'm thinking something akin to the trackback process could work very nicely for commenting. All a site would have to do is embed some comment-oriented trackback-like information on any pages that accepted comments. This is trivially simple to do on template driven weblog systems (and most weblogs are).
This would set into action the same sort of course of events. The difference, however, would be your comments might not be presented on your own weblog in a public fashion. That and your weblog server software would be the thing doing the 'posting' of the comment to the remote site. The remote site would have to understand how to start the process (embedded data) and how to accept the posting.
These are not impossible hurdles to overcome. And we have the MT folks to thank for offering up such a cool idea.
