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Discovery

On the IndieWeb, you are your URL and your URL is you. With a well-designed indieweb site, as humans we can discover all the information you choose to share about yourself.

This page is for documenting and brainstorming ways to discover that same information automatically by following a combination of semantic markup and algorithms.

Profile Info

Typical IndieWeb sites have profile and often contact information right there on the home page.

Best publishing practice: mark it all up with hCard, especially your hyperlinks to other profiles with class="u-url url" and rel="me". This will create a representative hCard which can then be used by other sites.

Examples in the wild:

Best parsing practice: when given an indieweb URL that represents a person, parse it for a representative hCard and use that hCard for information about that person. Details:

Separate Contact Page

Some IndieWeb sites have contact information on a separate page from the home page, but linked from the home page. While such links may be obvious to humans, e.g. with text labels like "Contact" or "About", it's not at all obvious to parsers where to find more information.

Examples of sites with separate contact/about pages:

Proposal:

  • With a new 'rel' value, e.g. rel="contact-info", parsers could discover such links, follow them, and then parse the destination for a representative hCard.

Updates

Most Indie web sites have updates on their home page, a stream of updates as it were, e.g.:

Best Publishing Practice: mark up your posts with hAtom (and ideally microformats2 h-entry as well).

Best Parsing Practice: parse the given URL for hAtom (and preferably microformats2 h-entry).

Others have a simple intro/contact page as their home page, and provide updates at another URL, e.g.:

  • ... old adactio.com
  • ... any current examples? maybe folks that have only an indieweb contact home page and then link to a separate page for their blog?

Proposal:

  • With a new 'rel' value, e.g. rel="updates", parsers could discover links to separate "journal", "updates", "notes", "stream" pages and then parse those for hAtom and h-entry.

Post Information

To discover information about a post on a post permalink page:

  • parse the page for h-entry and retrieve post name, summary, url, contents, author accordingly.

Authorship

  • if the author is also an h-card parse that for more information about the author such as name, photo, logo, url, etc.
  • if there is no p-author, then look for a rel-author link.
    • follow it, and retrieve the representative h-card from the destination for author information

POSSE copies

To find the POSSE copies of an original post, on that original post's permalink page:

  • look for rel=syndication links
  • treat their destinations as POSSE'd copies of the original post

Original post

To find an original post from a POSSE'd copy, on that POSSE'd copy's permalink page:

Real Time Updates

... rel=hub ... on link to PuSH hub for your updates.

Public Keys

For an improved Salmon key-discovery flow (i.e. not using DRY-violating XRD files and web-breaking email-like identifiers) we need to expose public keys somehow.

Help or About

HTML has the rel="help" value, but it's not clear that it conveys the "about" kind of resources you link to.

IndieWeb Documentation

For example:

Legacy Discovery

There are bunch of legacy discovery methods that are worth documenting, in case you want to interoperate with legacy systems that depend on them.

Feeds

... rel=alternate ... type=...+xml ...

We should deprecate separate feeds as

  • separate feeds are not technically necessary (hAtom or h-entry on visible HTML works just fine).
  • separate feeds violate the DRY principle

See Also

Retrieved from "http://indiewebcamp.com/discovery"