[wp-hackers] Trackback RDF

[Matthew Mullenweg]

Firas D. wrote:
> Matt, can you share your reasoning on this? It seems unnecessary and 
> very narrowminded to get rid of the TB RDF that MT etc use from WP's 
> packaged templates.

Trackback RDF is a highly fragile (and invalid) hack that didn't work 
half the time the code was in the page anyway, because most 
implementations require it to be in the first few K of a page before 
they stop reading. WordPress/b2 has *never* supported auto-discovery for 
trackback. We support a *real* non-proprietary standard (pingback) that 
excels in every way that Trackback fails. (Discovery, spam prevention, 
internationalization and character set issues, being lightweight, no 
RDF.) Asking for the RDF back is like asking us to support HTML 3.2 or 
CDF. When I talked to Ben about Trackback about a year ago he said that 
the next version of Trackback probably wouldn't even be compatible with 
the current and would be based on Atom or something. Finally if people 
really want to Trackback you they'll just copy and paste the URL, the WP 
dev blog gets hundreds despite never supporting the embedded RDF. If 
people want it back, the template tag is still there.

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
  http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
http://pingomatic.com | http://cnet.com