specifications

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XKCD Standards comic

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

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:

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

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:

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).

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