“If your software fails you,” writes Evgeny Kuznetsov, “it’s not always an indication that something is wrong with the protocol.” Which might be why my webmentions post this replies to begins, “Webmentions are strange, at least in how the WordPress plugin handles them.” Although, upon doing some reading, it’s my understanding that trackback does send a post excerpt, etc., although it’s optional; only pingback and webmention send just the URL.
In case no one has pinged you about it elsewhere… Your WordPress webmentions, pingbacks, and trackbacks will have a lot more context if you use the Semantic Linkbacks plugin in combination with the Webmention plugin. There’s an effort to unifiy them into a single plugin, but they were developed separately. The Webmention plugin only does the notification, the Semantic Linkbacks plugin does the additional work of processing the sending page and displaying some appropriate context. I think once you’re using it, you’ll realize that the UX/UI for Webmentions (as well as the older pingbacks and trackbacks) are much improved.
If you have questions/problems with them or want to chat with the developers on potentially improving them, I’ll invite you to join the IndieWeb WordPress chat: https://chat.indieweb.org/wordpress/.
