Beakermentions Endpoint

Beakermentions Endpoint is an endpoint implementation of the W3C Webmention recommendation for Beaker Browser users. Webmentions are a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it from another URL. This implementation utilizes Beaker Browser's hyperdrive and peersockets API. Deviations exist from the official recommendation due to the environment Beaker Browser provides:

• The source may reference the target URL of the Webmention through the file's metadata keys (like inReplyTo, likeOf, rsvpTo, etc.) in addition to the file's content.

• The sender may look for a metadata key webmention in the target's URL to discover the target's Beakermentions Endpoint in addition to the sender looking for an HTTP link header, a <link> element, or an <a> element with a rel attribute value of "webmention."

• Communication between the users and the Beakermentions Endpoint are done through Location search strings and beaker.peersockets instead of HTTP POST.

Mentions are not limited to HTML; any file can mention any other file using metadata key-value pairs.

Do note that this is only an endpoint implementation; an endpoint only saves source URLs that mention a particular target URL to a .webmention file in the target's drive. Any rendering of mentions (including which mentions to render) is done by an application itself after retrieving a target's sources.

For more information on Beakermentions, visit Beakermentions: Webmentions for Beaker Browser

This Project Is Archived

It was cool at the time to be able to essentially send and receive webmentions, but as I've started working more and more at my primary job post-pandemic, I've been coding less and less on this. As Beaker Browser is archived as of 27 December 2022, consequently I'm archiving Beakermentions, Beakermentions Endpoint, and Beakermentions Validator.

How This Works

1. Alice writes a new file and saves it to hyper://alice/microblog/a-good-day.md.

2. Alice adds a webmention metadata key to the new file with a value of their Beakermentions Endpoint: hyper://alice-beakermentions/

3. Alice opens their Beakermentions Endpoint so it's listening for new sent mentions, then minimizes it to the background.

4. Bob sees Alice's new file and wants to tell Alice that they like it! They write a new file in response, add their own webmention key in the metadata so others can respond to it, add a likeOf key with a value of Alice's file URL, and saves their response to hyper://bob/microblog/that-is-good.md.

5. Bob's application notices that the file they're saving mentions Alice's file. After saving, it offers to bring Bob to Alice's Beakermentions Endpoint's page to automatically send the mention: hyper://alice-beakermentions/?source=hyper://bob/microblog/that-is-good.md&target=hyper://alice/microblog/a-good-day.md&done=hyper://bob/.

6. Alice's Beakermentions Endpoint verifies that Alice wants their file mentioned by checking that their file's webmention key is the Beakermention Endpoint's URL, then checks Bob's file to make sure that they mention Alice's file URL in its metadata or in its content.

7. After verification, Alice's Beakermentions Endpoint stores the mention in hyper://alice/microblog/a-good-day.md.webmention, then sends Bob a success message. At this point, the endpoint may send Bob back to hyper://bob/.

As an alternative to step 5, Bob may interactively send the webmention (instead of their application) by visiting Alice's Beakermention Endpoint, entering their response as the source and Alice's file as the target, and pressing send.

Now, when an application opens Alice's file, they may notice the webmention key in the metadata. They may get all the stored mentions from the Beakermentions Endpoint by reading hyper://alice/microblog/a-good-day.md.webmention and display whichever mentions they want to present by processing each URL.

License

Written in 2020 by Don Geronimo. To the extent possible under law, Don Geronimo has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Beakermentions Endpoint by publishing it under the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. This work is published from the United States.

Satellite Antenna Emoji designed by OpenMoji – the open-source emoji and icon project. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: Removed empty padding and added license information in the file's metadata.

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