Simon Willison’s Weblog

Pingback 1.0

24th September 2002

Hixie has published the specification for Pingback 1.0. In general the specification is an excellent document, but I’m not entirely happy with the following statement:

HTML and XHTML documents MAY include a <link> element in addition to an HTTP header, although this is discouraged.

Some Pingback clients (in particular bookmarklets, although to my knowledge none have been written yet) are expected to be unable to parse headers—which is the primary reason for including the link element method of auto discovery. I would therefore suggest that anyone wishing to pingback-enable their HTML or XHTML documents should include a Pingback link element in addition to the HTTP header.