specifications

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Specifications (or standards) are technical documentation for communicating between two or more implementations in an interoperable way; for the indieweb in particular, standards help reach greater levels of user functionality to publish, express meaning, notify, subscribe, and many other user actions.

IndieWeb Specifications

• main: https://spec.indieweb.org/

The following specifications are used for dependable interoperability by the IndieWebCamp community.

Broadly implemented: These standards are interoperably implemented by the overwhelming majority of indieweb software, services, and websites:

• IndieAuth (W3C Note)
• microformats2
  • h-card
  • h-entry
  • h-feed
• Micropub (W3C Recommendation)
• rel-me
• Webmention (W3C Recommendation)
• WebSub (W3C Recommendation)

Numerous implementations: These standards have several implementations that interoperate, enough to consider the specifications fairly stable:

• authorship
• h-cite
• h-event

Being implemented / in development: These standards are undergoing active development and evolution as they are being implemented, tested in actual products with users, and then iterated for improvement:

• fragmentions
• Microsub
• original-post-discovery
• post-type-discovery (W3C Note)
• salmentions
• twtxt
• vouch

Stable with some support: These standards are stable (few or no changes in quite some time), yet only have some support, or are only supported by publishers:

• XFN (beyond rel=me) - many sites publish, no known consuming applications

Per IndieWebCamp principles, microformats specifications are (re-)used heavily as essential simple building block extensions to HTML.

Specs to iterate on

Here are specs we should iterate on for more formal publishing / announcing saying they're "done" enough etc. In rough order of simpler / shorter first (all of these should normatively reference microformats and IndieWeb specs as needed).

• post-type-discovery - AKA implied post type - see posts for a start on this.
  • +1 Kartik Prabhu (useful for me for comments-presentation and other responses)
  • +1 Jacky Alciné (core useful types are there, I'd like to see gameplay, excerise and read normalized though)
• authorship
  • +1 Kartik Prabhu (useful to discover author of a response)
  • +1 Jacky Alciné: (allows flexibility of author info) (2022-06-27)
• original-post-discovery
  • +1 Ryan Barrett. (When u-syndication links exist, or for a single known user, this is easy. Otherwise, interpreting backlinks is currently difficult and problematic.)
  • +1 Jacky Alciné Koype supports finding a post by its canonical url or its syndication URL, by using original-post-discovery (2022-06-27)
• indie-post-discovery - see and expand from original-post-discovery, and then incorporate PESOS scenarios as well
• fragmentions
  • +1 Kartik Prabhu
• post streams - simple minimal post-centric HTML-based approach to ActivityStreams
  • reference h-entry and add proposed properties necessary for IndieWeb use-cases e.g. u-tag-of etc.
• Vouch
• IndieAuth (2022-06-27 Jacky Alciné this looks like a duplicate?)
  • +0 Kartik Prabhu (not using it a lot yet, but surely in the future.)
• syndicate by reference
  • +1 Ryan Barrett (Bridgy has done this for a long time; IndieNews is migrating to it)
  • +1 Jacky Alciné (2022-06-27) Koype has support for handling syndication by reference as a client
• syndicate by content
  • +1 Jacky Alciné (2022-06-27) Koype has support for handling syndication by content as a client
• Private Webmention
• metaformats
  • +1 Anthony Ciccarello interested for use in reply context
• ...

Other specifications

There are other specifications that even though various IndieWeb implementations / sites may support, they're not necessary for web independence, and thus omitted here.

To keep things especially simpler for authors and publishers, the indieweb does not depend on any specifications which require the author to duplicate (e.g. DRY violate) their content on additional URLs (e.g. sidefile-antipattern).

See Also

• building blocks
• project
• formats
• protocols
• https://friend.camp/@darius/102253975831067238
  • "This is going to seem like a joke but it's not: in ~1978, there was a minor crisis around connecting the various networks (ARPA, CYCLADES, etc) into an "inter-network environment", aka the internet. Some of the discussions seems similar to our discussion of interoperability between content types in ActivityPub networks. I think it would behoove fediverse nerds to read up on this stuff.1978 paper summarizing the issue (PDF): https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien20.pdf" @darius June 11, 2019
• https://twitter.com/_/status/1342082362281234432
  • "IndieWeb people are wonderful. ❤️
    Many of the web standards started as personal experiments. They are giving good example of how to try new ideas without too heavy standardization process (before ideas have been tested)." @autiomaa December 24, 2020
• https://twitter.com/BrianNorgard/status/1454482653550301192
  • "“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
    
    —John Gall" @BrianNorgard October 30, 2021
• Thread: interoperability (and by implication, the existence of open standards for that interop) is more important than decentralization: https://twitter.com/EssentialRandom/status/1491308729677262849
  • "We talk too much about decentralization and not enough about interoperability" @EssentialRandom February 9, 2022