building-blocks-historical

From IndieWeb

Historical Building Blocks


There are numerous historical building blocks which are no longer necessary (and in many cases, not even supported) on the indieweb. They are listed here both as history, and to clearly communicate that each has been considered, and either rejected (e.g. Salmon), or iterated/improved upon (e.g. Pingback became Webmention).

Historical Mentions

Mention technologies:

  • pingback & trackback - origins of webmention (which is also the replacement)
  • salmon - was too complex/difficult for any more than a couple of implementations, unclear how much if any cross-implementation interoperability there ever was.

Historical Logins

  • OpenID - too difficult to consume. overly complex libraries often larger than the entirety of the rest of an indieweb implementation. too high a barrier for independent implementations.[1]
    • Historical significance:
      • OpenID was the first even remotely practical federated URL-based identity protocol that gained adoption, and thus it helped explore a lot of URL-based-identity issues (UX and otherwise). Much of that experience informed the design of web-sign-in.
      • OpenID was the URL-based-sign-in system used for this wiki and IndieWebCamp in 2011.[2]
    • Replacement: web-sign-in / indieauth, which have demonstrated better usability than OpenID[3].

See Also