2023/SD/opengraphpublishing

Open Graph Publishing was a session at IndieWebCamp San Diego 2023.

• Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/opengraphpublishing

Participants

• Joe Crawford (facilitator)
• Tantek Çelik
• Isaac
• Angelo Gladding
• David Shanske
• Anthony Ciccarello
• Peter Kaminski
• ... add names

Notes

What problem are we solving?

• What data
  • adding h-card etc makes me more discoverable. what's missing in that?
  • SEO vs citation
  • link previews
  • Microformats2 vs Open Graph

you want to see stuff show up from your links shared in Facebook etc.

• photo / featured image
• title
• author
• published date

link-preview

• X-Ray does data ingestion
• When there are not metaformats
• Plugins

Happy to use IndieWebify and load a page and validate and see the results

Could you make a meta-indieweb parser that says here's everything that's on a page that might get parsed?

Open Graph Validator

Google Validator?

Anthony: focusing on the fallback use-case for link previews

Map microformats to a link preview

Profiles? Bridgy Fed - turn an hcard back from a webpage

I do have a website. json preview built into webmention - tool inside the WordPress

If you have Post Kinds you can get that as well

xray.p3k.io - use that library

HTML validator, you could say test it against HTML 3.2 vs a stricter thing, 4.01 or HTML5 or XHTML

Is it possible to create a meta-validator that would show you, here's what X-ray would show you, or here's how Twitter would read this, here's how Facebook would read this, just to get a sense of what's on my page that's invisible.

microformats.io pages, show me the diffs from the different parsers

Do you really want that burden? Or are you morbidly curious?

Two different things:

• people who want to publish and have it be seen
• people who want to write consuming code

Not wanting to customize for one thing or another.

What's the least work to get the maximal effect, as a publisher?

David Shanske I'm lazy, manual hurts immediately for me. Would rather spend weeks building something.

Joe: I have a handrolled theme on WordPress, and when I added the IndieWeb plugin, I ended up creating some conflicts. I imagine people use plugins that do weird stuff in the markup. The problem is how to make these things interact correctly.

WordPress is hard because it has a lot of baggage.

People that are already using WordPress just want it to show up better.

Maybe the publishing advice is different for WordPress sites vs other sites?

Joe: I'm on WordPress, how do I IndieWeb?

We have Getting Started on WordPress.

Makes me want to personally revisit that page

Something about the View Source nature of the open web. People do get a browser and do it.

On Firefox for Android, you can type viewsource: to see the source. There should be a button.

Have learned a lot from looking at meta tags.

Some pages have meta bloat, does the opposite, it's discouraging.

JSON-LD was a pain in the butt.

The bloat problem is an issue. How little can I do?

I remember reading about Dublin Core metadata 20 years ago.

link-preview#How_to_publish

Less is more as an ethos, potentially? Could there be OG metadata that could be removed

How about the oddball consumers of it?

• Mattermost
  • Peter Kaminski runs a mattermost instance at https://chat.collectivesensecommons.org/
• iMessage
• Facebook
• Twitter
  • Do people care how their posts look in Twitter any more?
• Pinterest

• Goal is the most good for the most websites
• What is the minimal

Most people don't care about the JSON output, they want to know how it's understood and how a link preview is displayed.

Maybe we should have IndieWebifyMe support metaformats?

• or maybe a sub-page?
• IndieWebify fallbacks

There's a ton of NPM packages for parsing metadata

• People will use different ones.
• They have a different focus, e.g. specialty algorithms for YouTube, might not be appealing to everyone

David Shanske: I want authorship

Twitter removed some of the facility of what a link preview was, and there was some outrage around that.

How do you recommend the best practice?

What's missing from link-preview#How_to?

Instead of focusing on technical stuff, the thing to do is to focus on technical leadership

• Threads might be a great place to start

Seeing these different communities in silos

• Facebook isn't going to adopt because of a tech thing, they will because someone higher-up makes a decision

Are we targeting corporations or people? And we have always chosen to work on things for people.

Difference between trying to get them to use something, and trying to get them to be friends.

Example of Identity for Mastodon and federated services, and we have IndieAuth, it's still interoperable and solves all these problems.

We are looking to make things simpler, and others are trying to layer on complexity.

rel=me is a good counter-example, it was the first social web standard that Threads supported

Anthony: can we get a link-preview validator/previewer on IndieWebify?

• https://github.com/indieweb/indiewebify-me/
• https://indiewebify.me/
• Good call to action. Similar use-case: reply-context display

Here's what it looks like and here's what you could add.

Anthony filed a GH issue on IndieWebify

See Also

• 2023/SD/Schedule