Category: WordPress

Note: this will probably be rambling and will need editing to add links and such, but I needed to put it odwn and put it out there

IndieWeb has many meanings and a singluar meaning–own your content on a domain you control. Plumbing, how you create the content, how it is stored and how you display it is all up to you. As long as it is your content that you can take with you on a domain name you control, you are IndieWeb already.

But with the recently published article about Webmentions, IndieWeb also takes on having the ability to also interact from your own site. A practical example:

• I publish this post its syndicated to Twitter, micro.blog and a feed (atom as well as jsonfeed).
• You reply with a tweet, it shows up as a comment on the site. Someone else replies within micro.blog, same thing. Someone else reads it in their feed reader and writes a blog post sendinga webmention, same - shows up as a comment.
• I can reply natively to each comment and it will aggregate back to my site.

All accomplished with existing WordPress plugins available in the wp.org repo.

The catch? Microformats. Specifically Microformats 2. That is the semantic markup in the theme that facilitates communicating the context of the content.

WordPress still supports the original microformats, which can cause problems when parsing mf2. There was an attempt to introduce mf2 into WP core

Then, it was closed as wontfix because changing a class name might break themes that used it as a style hook.

I can't see how the change could be made without breaking a majority of WordPress sites.

• Peter Wilson - Core committer

That was 2 years ago. And while I'm still trying to get an exact current state of affairs to know precisely what needs changed, I'm saying its time to rethink this decision.

WordPress has always had the tag line "democratizing the web." As we enter a new phase of the Internet and fears of walled gardens and homogonized social silos, now more than ever WordPress should use a major update to introduce what I would suggest a minor breaking change in display on some sites to allow further development of inter-site communication using WordPress.

Gutenberg is ushering in a slew of changes in how themes will work best, so if there is a good time to change something like a css class, why not now?