specifications



 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:
 * 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 (useful for me for comments-presentation and other responses)
 * +1 (core useful types are there, I'd like to see gameplay, excerise and read normalized though)
 * authorship
 * +1 (useful to discover author of a response)
 * +1 : (allows flexibility of author info) (2022-06-27)
 * original-post-discovery
 * +1 . (When u-syndication links exist, or for a single known user, this is easy. Otherwise, interpreting backlinks is currently difficult and problematic.)
 * +1 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
 * 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 this looks like a duplicate?)
 * +0 (not using it a lot yet, but surely in the future.)
 * syndicate by reference
 * +1 (Bridgy has done this for a long time; IndieNews is migrating to it)
 * +1 (2022-06-27) Koype has support for handling syndication by reference as a client
 * syndicate by content
 * +1 (2022-06-27) Koype has support for handling syndication by content as a client
 * Private Webmention

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).