TrackBack Technical Specification

Six Apart : Developer Documentation : TrackBack Technical Specification
TrackBack Technical Specification
This document describes TrackBack, a framework for peer-to-peer communication and notifications between web sites. The central idea behind TrackBack is the idea of a TrackBack ping, a request saying, essentially, "resource A is related/linked to resource B." A TrackBack "resource" is represented by a TrackBack Ping URL, which is just a standard URI.
Using TrackBack, sites can communicate about related resources. For example, if Weblogger A wishes to notify Weblogger B that he has written something interesting/related/shocking, A sends a TrackBack ping to B. This accomplishes two things:
Weblogger B can automatically list all sites that have referenced a particular post on his site, allowing visitors to his site to read all related posts around the web, including Weblogger A's.
The ping provides a firm, explicit link between his entry and yours, as opposed to an implicit link (like a referrer log) that depends upon outside action (someone clicking on the link).
Sending a TrackBack Ping
TrackBack uses a REST model, where requests are made through standard HTTP calls. To send a TrackBack ping, the client makes a standard HTTP request to the server, and receives a response in a simple XML format (see below for more details).
In the TrackBack system, the URL that receives TrackBack pings is the TrackBack Ping URL. A typical TrackBack Ping URL looks like http://www.example.com/trackback/5, where 5 is the TrackBack ID. Server implementations can use whatever format makes sense for the TrackBack Ping URL; client implementations should not depend on a particular format.
To send a ping, the client sends an HTTP POST request to the TrackBack Ping URL. The client MUST send a Content-Type HTTP header, with the content type set to application/x-www-form-urlencoded. The client SHOULD include the character encoding of the content being sent (title, excerpt, and weblog name) in the charset attribute of the Content-Type header.
For example, a ping request might look like:
POST http://www.example.com/trackback/5Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8title=Foo+Bar&url=http://www.bar.com/&excerpt=My+Excerpt&blog_name=Foo
The possible parameters in the request content are the following:
title
The title of the entry.
Optional.
excerpt
An excerpt of the entry.
Optional.
url
The permalink for the entry. Like any permalink, this should point as closely as possible to the actual entry on the HTML page, as it will be used when linking to the entry in question.
Required. If a client neglects to send a url, the server MUST respond with an error message.
blog_name
The name of the weblog to which the entry was posted.
Optional.
All of the fields provided MUST be in the character encoding specified in charset.
There are no length restrictions on the above fields inherent in the TrackBack protocol, but server implementations are free to crop or ignore any of the above fields.
In the event of a succesful ping, the server MUST return a response in the following format:
0
In the event of an unsuccessful ping, the server MUST return an HTTP response in the following format:
1The error messageAuto-Discovery of TrackBack Ping URLs
TrackBack clients need a method of determining the TrackBack Ping URL for a particular URL or weblog entry. Server implementations should include embedded RDF in the pages they produce; the RDF represents metadata about an entry, allowing clients to auto-discover the TrackBack Ping URL.
Sample RDF looks like this:

Note: because current validators choke on RDF embedded in XHTML, if you want your pages to validate you may wish to enclose the above RDF in HTML comments:

This is not a perfect solution, but it works as a temporary fix.
The dc: elements are standard Dublin Core elements; the trackback:ping element comes from the TrackBack Module for RSS 1.0/2.0 at http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/.
Given a URL my_url, clients should follow these steps:
Send an HTTP GET request to retrieve the contents of the page at my_url.
Scan the page contents for embedded RDF. Pages can contain multiple instances of embedded RDF--clients should pick the block whose dc:identifier matches my_url.
Extract the trackback:ping value from the block of RDF. This is the TrackBack Ping URL.
Once the client has determined the TrackBack Ping URL, it can send a TrackBack ping (see"Sending a TrackBack Ping").
Example auto-discovery code is below in"Examples".
Examples
Sample TrackBack Implementation
To aid perspective developers in implementing TrackBack in their own systems, we are releasing a standalone implementation of TrackBack that is not dependent on Movable Type. It accepts pings sent through HTTP requests, stores the pings locally in the filesystem, and can return a list of pings sent on a particular TrackBack item in RSS format. It also generates RSS files statically, if you want it to. This can be useful for including a list of the last 15 TrackBack pings on a sidebar on your site, for example.
The standalone implementation can be downloaded from http://www.movabletype.org/downloads/tb-standalone.tar.gz.
It is released under the Artistic License. The terms of the Artistic License are described at http://www.perl.com/language/misc/Artistic.html.
Installation and usage instructions are at http://www.movabletype.org/docs/tb-standalone.html.
Sample Auto-Discovery
The Net::TrackBack Perl module provides an easy interface for doing TrackBack auto-discovery.
use Net::TrackBack::Client;my $url = 'http://www.example.com/weblog/';my $client = Net::TrackBack::Client->new;my $data = $client->discover($url);if (Net::TrackBack->is_message($data)) {## An error occurred trying to fetch $url.die $data->message;} else {## $data is a reference to an array of Net::TrackBack::Data objects.for my $resource (@$data) {print $resource->ping, "\n";}}Authors
Six Apart, http://www.sixapart.com/
Version
1.2
History
1.2 (August 1, 2004)
Clients SHOULD send the character encoding of the content being sent in the charset attribute to the Content-Type HTTP header.
Removed the Retrieving TrackBack Pings section, which was not standard and implemented only in a couple of servers. It will return, in a different format, in a future revision of the spec (2.0).
Cleaned up a lot of the language in the specification and made it more specification-like.
Converted autodiscovery example to use Net::TrackBack.
1.1 (October 10, 2002)
TrackBack pings should now be sent using HTTP POST instead of GET. The old behavior is deprecated, and support for GET will be removed in January 2003.
In the RDF, the TrackBack Ping URL should now be stored in the trackback:ping element, rather than rdf:about.
Changed the format of the sample TrackBack Ping URL to use the PATH_INFO instead of the query string.
The embedded RDF used for auto-discovery no longer causes pages to fail validation.
Added sample code for auto-discovery.
1.0 (August 28, 2002)
Initial release.
Credits
Thanks to Paul Prescod and others for their guidance on making TrackBack more REST-like.