Ton continues to wrap his head around Webmention, and wonders about how mentions should be displayed on the “mentioned” site:
What strikes me as odd now is how little control I have over how the Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins actually deal with webmention data. The stuff I’d like to show is stored in my database, but I can’t through the plugins determine how that is shown.
The same is true on the flipside: my site adds microformats so others can machine read my blog, but apparently it doesn’t do it right. Yet I have no control from the mentioned plugins interfaces over how that is done, nor do I have documentation / insight into how the plugins are designed to comply with microformat specifications.
The h-entry page on the Microformats Wiki sheds some light on this, providing some options for marking up links in a way that affects the semantics, and the rel-values page in the IndieWeb wiki has some further discussion of options, but there doesn’t yet seem to be a clear way forward here.
It does seem like it would be useful to allow an author to add semantics to links that would differentiate between commenting, mentioning, liking and re-posting, and that seems to be the way that things are headed.
Looking at a section of Ton’s post, for example, where he links both to Sven Knebel’s contribution and to his own, both links are marked it with u-in-reply-to:
<p>I very much appreciate how <a href="https://www.svenknebel.de/posts/2018/7/4/" class="u-in-reply-to">Sven Knebel extensively responded</a> to my previous <a href="https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2018/07/wrapping-my-head-around-webmentions/" class="u-in-reply-to">posting on some Webmention issues</a> I came across. Some of his responses do make me have new questions.</p>While he’s clearly replying to Sven’s post, Ton’s reference to his own post isn’t really “in reply to” himself, it’s merely mentioning it; perhaps these mentions should be rendered differently?
