One page that’s getting a lot of linkage at the moment is Daring Fireball’s essay Take Your TrackBacks and Dangle, which is a long rant about how TrackBack, the cross-site notification technology developed by SixApart for its Weblogging software Movable Type, sucks. (Full disclosure: Ant’s Eye View is powered by Movable Type.)
I think TrackBack is a pretty good spec, overall, but I’m not going to go into detail arguing every point in the essay (it’s a long rant and it would take all morning to do so in detail). I only wanted to address one of DF’s complaints, one which I’ve heard other people make and which I think is pretty much off base: that TrackBack is hard to implement.
DF raises this point in his section entitled “Preemptive Responses to Certain Anticipated Pro-Trackback Rebuttals”:
TrackBack is not hard to implement.
Yes it is. Itâ??s not hard compared to, say, nuclear physics, but it is hard compared to making a plain old HTML web page.
I’m not sure where the “it’s hard to implement” criticism comes from, since a “TrackBack ping” is just a fancy name for an HTTP POST. Yes! That’s it. If you can handle writing a script to parse the contents of an online form, you can write a script to parse incoming TrackBacks. Similarly, sending TrackBacks is just a matter of sending a POST. And writing a script to handle an HTTP POST is pretty much as low as the bar gets for Web programming anyway.
I know whereof I speak on this issue: as an educational exercise, I sat down and rolled my own TrackBack engine in Perl. It took me about two hours to get working, and I’m not exactly a code god by any stretch of the imagination.
If you’re just flat-out not a programmer, SixApart even provides a free, open-source implementation of TrackBack that you can use and modify however you wish. All it requires is the ability to run CGI scripts on your server, which any Web server can handle (that’s why CGI stands for “Common Gateway Interface”), and that you have Perl, which, again, everyone does.
I suppose I could come up with some criticisms of TrackBack, but “it’s hard to get working” sure wouldn’t be one of them.
Posted by Jason Lefkowitz at June 13, 2003Ant's Eye View is edited by Jason Lefkowitz, a consultant and Web developer in Alexandria, Virginia. Got a question, comment, or concern? Let me hear it!
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