Aquiles Carattino (aquiles.me)Should transclusion work both ways, embedding content and letting the source know that I did so? ❧
If the original quoted page changes, it could potentially send a webmention (technically a salmention in function) to all the pages that had previously mentioned it to create updates.
Automatic transclusion can also be more problematic in terms of original useful data being used as a vector of spam, graffiti, or other abuses.
As an example, I can “transclude” a portion of your page onto my own website as a reply context for my comment and syndicate a copy to Hypothes.is. If you’ve got Webmentions on your site, you’ll get a notification.
For several years now I’ve been considering why digital gardens/zettelkasten/commonplace books don’t implement webmention as a means of creating backlinks between wikis as a means of sites having conversations?
Note: I’ve also gone in and annotated a copy of Maggie Appleton’s article with some additional thoughts that Aquiles Carattino and others may appreciate.
Interesting note. I think that part of the problems arise when the implementation is partial, for example if you transclude a page that does not implement webmentions, etc.
I, for example, can receive webmentions but do not send them (yet), because I couldn’t find a good approach to implementing them in my static website builder.
I wonder what would happen if you start with a small, closed group of people, say colleagues in a company, research groups, etc. Perhaps an experiment at smaller scales gives an idea of what to do at larger ones
This is a problem of availability, which can be fixed by greater uptake of Webmention. It’s been a W3C standard for quite a while now. I’ve seen some anecdotal evidence of some much bigger uptake of them on websites in the past six months and there’s some reasonable data available from the biggest sender (and possibly receiver?) that they’ve been moving up more rapidly lately.
It also depends with whom you’re interacting. Your comment above is one of the first non-webmention based reactions I’ve gotten this year (over 500 total reactions so far.) I think there’s been enough experimentation of site-to-site conversation using Webmention in the wild to verify its value and to improve the UI on various platforms. It definitely needs uptake by more systems operating as wikis, zettelkasten, digital gardens, etc. I’ve got a few wikis set up with webmention.io for receiving. The quickest way to get display is Fluffy’s webmention.js script setup. Naturally, it’s better/easier if platforms like WikiMedia, TiddlyWiki, RoamResearch, Obsidian, Netlify, et al would build them in or make simple-to-use plugins the way WordPress and Drupal have. This would improve a lot of of the display side so that comments, replies, etc. all look more native to each of those sites rather than just a list at the bottom.
As for your problem about sending Webmentions, there are a few methods for static sites. The simplest I’ve seen are people using webmention.app with tools like IFTTT and RSS to trigger their pages sending mentions on their behalf. There are certainly other methods. I recommend visiting the IndieWeb #dev channel and asking others how they’ve done it. A bit of research on https://indieweb.org/static_site_generator or the IndieWeb wiki page for your particular SSG may give specific examples and even tutorials about how to do it yourself.
If you want to experiment with simply sending them manually there are a few tools and methods for doing that as well: https://indieweb.org/Webmention#Manual_Webmentions.