If you’ve been reading this blog, or Reader Appreciation Project for the last few months you may have noticed an ongoing discussion in posts and comments about the usefulness and potential replacements for trackbacks / pingbacks. Put simply I believe that trackbacks and pingbacks are almost useless right now, and I want to change that.

The key problem is that the text that ends up on the page is, honestly, useless. The text is taken out from around the link based on characters with no context or semantics. Most of the time the result looks something like this:

[...]Person X has written a post about thing y, here is a link.[...]

This tells us nothing except that a link exists, and often interrupts the conversation.

To find a solution I decided that it would be necessary to identify the meaning of the link. A, ‘Go look at this’ link has no business being tracked, it is meaningless to every visitor to the page being linked to. There is no reason for the visitor to move in the opposite direction to the link. These then can be ignored.

This leaves posts that not only link, but also comment on the content. These are useful, add to the conversation, and should be tracked.

It seems clear to me that what we are talking about is semantics. We are trying to identify the meaning behind the content, and this is what Microformats were made for.

I think that the hReview Microformat is perfect for marking up offsite comments (posts with pingbacks). What is a comment if not a review? Better yet the format already features a summary class that can be used to quick and simply summarise the points for readers of the original post.

Is this a good idea? I want to test it out and that is what this post is all about.

I have written a rough plugin to parse hReview review pingbacks, based on the hkit Microformat parser, It hasn’t had much testing, and so I am hoping that you will help me by writing a post using the html below, an hReview.

If you are using WordPress it will ping me automatically as there is a link to this post, and the plugin will parse your post looking for an hReview, hopefully including your full summary as the comment text. I hope the html is fairly self explanatory.

[html]

To help things along a little I have removed the normal comment option from this post so it is pings only. I appreciate any help you can provide.

Update: I have found a problem with the implementation that I don’t really understand. It seems that there is a problem with XPath when it uses normalize-space in that it sometimes treats spaces between words as whitepace nodes and deletes them. I need to research this a bit more as this is all contained within HKIT and isn’t something I have ever used, but for the time being it means the odd space may be missing from pingbacked comments.

Update: The problem with the spaces is actually nothing do to with XPath so, thankfully, I don’t need to get into that. The problem was actually caused by a combination of Tidy wrapping content, and removing spaces in the process, and hkit then removing the line breaks.