As a word of caution, there are notable differences in the manner in which Web browsers and other software stacks outside the HTML context handle URLs. While no changes would be accepted to URL processing that would break existing Web content, some important parts of URL processing should therefore be considered as implementation-defined (e.g. parsing
Please check the errata for any errors or issues reported since publication.
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ERCIM,
Keio, Beihang).
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Webmention is a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site. From the receiver's perspective, it's a way to request notifications when other sites mention it.
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A Webmention is a notification that one URL links to another. For example, Alice writes an interesting post on her blog. Bob then writes a response to her post on his own site, linking back to Alice's original post. Bob's publishing software sends a Webmention to Alice notifying that her article was replied to, and Alice's software can show that reply as a comment on the original post. Sending a Webmention is not limited to blog posts, and can be used for additional kinds of content and responses as well. For example, a response can be an RSVP to an event, an indication that someone "likes" another post, a "bookmark" of another post, and many others. Webmention enables these interactions to happen across different websites, enabling a distributed social web. This section is non-normative. A typical Webmention flow is as follows:
This section is non-normative. Webmentions are sent "from" a source URL "to" a target URL to notify the target that it has been mentioned at the source URL. The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "
SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]. Webmention implementations are either senders or receivers. This section describes the conformance criteria for both. Listed below are known types of Webmention implementations. The conformance criteria for Webmention senders is described in Sending Webmentions The conformance criteria for Webmention receivers is described in Receiving Webmentions For this specification to exit the CR stage, there must be at least two independent, interoperable implementations of each feature. Each feature may be implemented by a different set of products. There is no requirement that all features be implemented by a single product. For the purposes of this criterion, we define the following terms: A Webmention Sender is an implementation that sends Webmentions, the conformance criteria are described in Sending Webmentions. In order for a Sender to send a Webmention, there must first be a document at a URL that is accessible to the Receiver. A Webmention Receiver is an implementation that receives Webmentions to one or more target URLs on which the Receiver's Webmention endpoint is advertised. The conformance criteria for Receivers are described in Receiving Webmentions. In order to receive a Webmention, there must be a URL that advertises the Receiver's Webmention endpoint. The URL is not considered part of the Receiver's implementation, as it may exist in an entirely different system or domain. Each implementation must be developed by a different party and cannot share, reuse, or derive from code used by another qualifying implementation. Sections of code that have no bearing on the implementation of this specification are exempt from this requirement. A Sender and Receiver implementation are considered interoperable for a specific feature when the Sender 1) can discover the Webmention endpoint for the target URL for all specified ways of finding the endpoint (allowing the Receiver to change the way the endpoint is advertised without changing the Sender implementation), and 2) considers the Webmention request successful for all specified ways a Receiver may indicate success. An Implementation is a Webmention Sender or Receiver which meets all of the following criteria: For the purposes of evaluating exit criteria, each of the following is considered a feature: Please submit your implementation reports at http://webmention.net/implementation-reports/. Instructions are provided at the URL. The implementation report template references the tests available at webmention.rocks. webmention.rocks provides many test cases you can use to live-test your implementation. It also is a good tool to use while developing a Webmention implementation, as it provides detailed responses when errors are encountered. This specification uses the link rel registry as defined by [HTML5] for both HTML and HTTP link relations. Webmentions are sent "from" a source URL "to" a target URL to notify the target that it has been mentioned at the source URL. Before a Webmention can be sent, there needs to be a source URL to send the Webmention "from", often a blog post but may be any type of content. For example, the URL at https://waterpigs.example/post-by-barnaby may contain the following HTML that has a link to Aaron's post. The sender MUST fetch the target URL (and follow redirects [FETCH]) and check for an HTTP Link header [RFC5988] with a rel value of The endpoint MAY be a relative URL, in which case the sender MUST resolve it relative to the
The endpoint MAY contain query string parameters, which MUST be preserved as query string parameters and MUST NOT be sent as POST body parameters when sending the Webmention request. Senders MAY initially make an HTTP HEAD request [RFC7231] to check for the Link header before making a GET request. Senders MAY customize the HTTP User Agent [RFC7231] used when fetching the target URL in order to indicate to the recipient that this request is made as part of Webmention discovery. In this case, it is recommended to include the string "Webmention" in the User Agent. This provides people with a pointer to find out why the discovery request was made. The sender MUST post x-www-form-urlencoded [HTML5] Note that if the Webmention endpoint URL contains query string parameters, the query string parameters MUST be preserved, and MUST NOT be sent in the POST body. The Webmention endpoint will validate and process the request, and return an HTTP status code [RFC7231]. Most often, Any If the source URL was updated, the sender SHOULD re-send any previously sent Webmentions, (including re-sending a Webmention to a URL that may have been removed from the document), and SHOULD send Webmentions for any new links that appear at the URL. This allows the recipients of Webmentions to update their display of the source document, or otherwise notify the recipient that a post that mentioned one of their URLs was updated. When sending a Webmention when a post is updated, the sender MUST re-discover the Webmention endpoint of each target URL, in case the target has updated their Webmention endpoint. If a response to the source URL is shown on the source URL page (e.g. as a comment), then sender SHOULD treat that as an update of the source URL and re-send any previously sent Webmentions. If the source URL was deleted, the sender SHOULD return an HTTP This allows receivers which may have displayed a previously received Webmention as a comment or other interaction to remove it from view if they support deletes, while providing a reasonable fallback for receivers which only support updates. Upon receipt of a POST request containing the If the receiver creates a status page which the sender can use to check the status, the receiver MUST reply with an If the receiver processes the request asynchronously but does not return a status URL, the receiver MUST reply with an If the receiver chooses to process the request and perform the verification step synchronously (not recommended), it MUST respond with a The receiver MUST check that The receiver MUST reject the request if the source URL is the same as the target URL. The receiver SHOULD check that Note that a target URL may contain a fragment identifier, and if the receiver limits which URLs can receive Webmentions, the fragment SHOULD be ignored when checking if the URL is supported. Webmention verification SHOULD be handled asynchronously to prevent DoS attacks. If the receiver is going to use the Webmention in some way, (displaying it as a comment on a post, incrementing a "like" counter, notifying the author of a post), then it MUST perform an HTTP GET request on source, following any HTTP redirects (and SHOULD limit the number of redirects it follows) to confirm that it actually mentions the target. The receiver SHOULD include an HTTP Accept header indicating its preference of content types that are acceptable. The receiver SHOULD use per-media-type rules to determine whether the source document mentions the target URL. For example, in an [
HTML5] document, the receiver should look for At this point, the receiver MAY publish content from the source page on the target page or other pages, along with any other data it picks up from the source. For example, the receiver may display the contents of the source as a comment on the post, or may display the author's profile photo in a list of others who have sent similar Webmentions, e.g. showing a list of people who have all "liked" a post. If the Webmention was not successful because of something the
sender did, it MUST return a Possible sender-related errors that can be returned synchronously before making a GET request to the source:
Possible sender-related errors that can occur after fetching the contents of the source URL:
If the Webmention was not successful because of an error on the receiver's server, it SHOULD return a If receiver had received a Webmention in the past with the same
The Webmention protocol relies on the sender making a GET (or HEAD) request to discover the receiver's endpoint, followed by the receiver making a GET request to the sender's web page to verify the link. This means a sender can cause a receiver to make GET requests to arbitrary URLs, opening up a potential DoS vector. Receivers MAY make an initial HTTP HEAD request when verifying the link and decide whether to make a full GET request after initially inspecting the content type, length, or other HTTP headers returned. Receivers SHOULD place limits on the number of HTTP redirects they follow, for example limiting the number to 20, in order to prevent being stuck in a redirect loop if the sender continues to send redirects. Receivers SHOULD place limits on the amount of data and time they spend fetching unverified source URLs. For example, if a source URL doesn't respond within 5 seconds, it can treat that as a failure. Similarly, the receiver can fetch only the first 1mb of the page, since any reasonable HTML or JSON page will be smaller than that. When the sender discovers the receiver's Webmention endpoint, there is no legitimate reason for the endpoint to be localhost or any other loopback address. If the sender has any services that listen on localhost that don't require authentication, it's possible for a malicious Webmention receiver to craft a Webmention endpoint that could cause the sender to make an arbitrary POST request to itself. During the discovery step, if the sender discovers the endpoint is localhost or a loopback IP address (127.0.0.0/8), it SHOULD NOT send the Webmention. This specification does not define any special handling of a Webmention request that may contain additional headers or parameters such as authentication headers or session cookies. However, if a Webmention endpoint does accept requests with additional headers, it SHOULD protect itself against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. One way to prevent CSRF attacks is by including a CSRF token in a query string parameter of the Webmention endpoint, so that a Webmention sender finds the token when discovering the endpoint. For example, the target URL could advertise a Webmention endpoint that includes a CSRF token: Then, when the Webmention endpoint is processing a request, it can first check the validity of the CSRF token before any other processing. It is possible for an attacker to advertise a Webmention endpoint that points to an arbitrary URL. As such, if you install software that sends Webmentions on a server that is behind a firewall or otherwise has access to normally protected resources, you should be aware that an attacker can cause the server to send a POST request to an internal server. You SHOULD take precautions to ensure this server cannot access protected resources by either: These questions provide an overview of security and privacy considerations for this specification as guided by Self-Review Questionnaire: Security and Privacy ([security-privacy-questionnaire]). If your source document is not HTML, (such as a PDF), or is otherwise restricted from fetching the raw source via a plain HTTP GET request, (such as behind a paywall, or requires a click-through license agreement), you will need to set up an HTML "landing page" that lists all the targets you wish to send Webmentions to. After creating this HTML landing page, you can use its URL as the source URL when sending Webmentions. This gives receivers a URL they can fetch to verify the link to their target URL, while avoiding making the complete source document public. Creating an HTML landing page can help increase the number of inbound links to your content, by providing people with a useful place to link to when referencing otherwise restricted content such as scholarly articles. In the case of a scholarly article, the landing page should include the list of references in the HTML, so that you can use them as Webmention target URLs. When performing Webmention discovery, Senders SHOULD respect the HTTP cache headers [RFC7234] returned by the target URL and avoid fetching the target URL more often than is indicated by the headers. The link relation type below has been registered by IANA per Section 6.2.1 of [RFC5988]: If your implementation wants to treat the This section is non-normative. The following Webmention Extension Specifications have 2+ interoperable implementations live on the web and are thus listed here: The [Vouch] protocol is an anti-spam extension to Webmention. The [Salmention] protocol is an extension to Webmention to propagate comments and other interactions upstream. The [Private-Webmention] protocol is an extension to Webmention that supports sending and verifying Webmentions for posts that have access control. This section is non-normative.
This section is non-normative. You can find a list of articles about Webmention on the IndieWeb wiki. This section is non-normative. You can find a list of Webmention implementations on webmention.net The editor wishes to thank Sandeep Shetty for contributing the original draft of the Webmention specification. Additionally, the editor wishes to thank the IndieWeb community and other implementers for their support, encouragement and enthusiasm, including but not limited to: Amy Guy, Benjamin Roberts, Ben Werdmüller, Dave Wilkinson, Rob Sanderson, and Tantek Çelik. This section is non-normative. This section lists changes from the 12 January 2016 FPWD to this Working Draft Note: URLs can be used in numerous different manners, in many differing contexts. For the purpose of producing strict URLs one may wish to consider [RFC3986] and [RFC3987]. The URL specification defines the term URL, various algorithms for dealing with URLs, and an API for constructing, parsing, and resolving URLs. Developers are advised to keep abreast of the latest URL developments by tracking the progress of https://url.spec.whatwg.org/. As a word of caution, there are notable differences in the manner in which Web browsers and other software stacks outside the HTML context handle URLs. While no changes would be accepted to URL processing that would break existing Web content, some important parts of URL processing should therefore be considered as implementation-defined (e.g. parsing file: URLs or operating on URLs that would be syntax errors under the [RFC3986] [RFC3987] syntax). Anne van Kesteren"
],
"status": "Continually Updated Specification",
"publisher": "WHATWG",
"note": "HI"
}
}
}
Webmention
W3C Proposed Recommendation
Abstract
Status of This Document
1. Introduction
1.2 Overview
1.3 Protocol Summary
source set to Barnaby's post's permalinktarget set to Aaron's post's permalink.target in the Webmention is a valid permalink on Aaron's blog (if not, processing stops).source in the Webmention (when retrieved, after following redirects [FETCH]) contains a hyperlink to the target (if not, processing stops).2. Conformance
2.1 Conformance Classes
Senders
Receivers
2.2 Candidate Recommendation Exit Criteria
2.2.1 Sender
2.2.2 Receiver
2.2.3 Independent
2.2.4 Interoperable
2.2.5 Implementation
2.2.6 Feature
2.3 Test Suite and Reporting
3. Webmention Protocol
3.1 Sending Webmentions
3.1.1 Create a source document that mentions the target
<!doctype html>
<html>
<body>
<a href="https://aaronpk.example/post-by-aaron">This is a great post</a>
</body>
</html>3.1.2 Sender discovers receiver Webmention endpoint
webmention. If the content type of the document is HTML, then the sender MUST look for an HTML <link> and
<a> element with a rel value of webmention. If more than one of these is present, the first HTTP Link header takes precedence, followed by the first <link> or <a> element in document order. Senders MUST support all three options and fall back in this order.target URL according to [URL].GET /post-by-aaron HTTP/1.1
Host: aaronpk.example
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Link: <http://aaronpk.example/webmention-endpoint>; rel="webmention"
<html>
<head>
...
<link href="http://aaronpk.example/webmention-endpoint" rel="webmention" />
...
</head>
<body>
....
<a href="http://aaronpk.example/webmention-endpoint" rel="webmention">webmention</a>
...
</body>
</html>3.1.3 Sender notifies receiver
source and
target parameters to the Webmention endpoint, where
source is the URL of the sender's page containing a link, and target is the URL of the page being linked to.202 Accepted or 201 Created will be returned, indicating that the request is queued and being processed asynchronously to prevent DoS attacks. If the response code is 201, the Location header will include a URL that can be used to monitor the status of the request.2xx response code MUST be considered a success.POST /webmention-endpoint HTTP/1.1
Host: aaronpk.example
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
source=https://waterpigs.example/post-by-barnaby&
target=https://aaronpk.example/post-by-aaron
HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted3.1.4 Sending Webmentions for updated posts
3.1.5 Sending Webmentions for deleted posts
410 Gone status code for the URL, and SHOULD display a "tombstone" representation of the deleted post, typically by blanking out the values of any properties in the post, and/or replacing the primary content of the post (e.g. the name and/or content of [h-entry]) with "Deleted". The sender SHOULD then re-send Webmentions for every previously sent Webmention for that document.3.2 Receiving Webmentions
source and
target parameters, the receiver SHOULD verify the parameters (see Request Verification below) and then
SHOULD queue and process the request asynchronously, prevent DoS attacks. There are three possible responses to the request, depending on how the receiver processes it.HTTP 201 Created response with a Location header pointing to the status URL. The response body MAY contain content.HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Location: http://aaronpk.example/webmention/DEhB9JmeHTTP 202 Accepted response. The response body MAY contain content, in which case a human-readable response is recommended.HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted200 OK status on success.3.2.1 Request Verification
source and target are valid URLs [URL] and are of schemes that are supported by the receiver. (Most commonly this means checking that the source and target schemes are http or https).target is a valid resource for which it can accept Webmentions. This check SHOULD happen synchronously to reject invalid Webmentions before more in-depth verification begins. What a 'valid resource' means is up to the receiver. For example, some receivers may accept Webmentions for multiple domains, others may accept Webmentions for only the same domain the endpoint is on.3.2.2 Webmention Verification
<a href="*">,
<img href="*">, <video src="*"> and other similar links. In a [JSON] document, the receiver should look for properties whose values are an exact match for the URL. If the document is plain text, the receiver should look for the URL by searching for the string. Other content types may be handled at the implementer's discretion. The source document MUST have an exact match of the target URL provided in order for it to be considered a valid Webmention.3.2.3 Error Responses
400 Bad Request status code and MAY include a description of the error in the response body.
target URL not found.target URL does not accept Webmentions.source URL was malformed or is not a supported URL scheme (e.g. a mailto: link)
source URL not found.source URL does not contain a link to the target URL.500 Internal Server Error status code and MAY include a description of the error in the response body.3.2.4 Updating existing Webmentions
source and target then,
source for the existing Webmention.
410 Gone status code on step 2 (performing a GET request on source), or received a 200 OK status code and does not find a mention of target on source, it SHOULD delete the existing Webmention, or mark it as deleted.source and target with no content changes should not show as multiple replies.4. Security Considerations
4.1 Preventing Abuse
4.2 Limits on GET requests
4.3 Avoid sending Webmentions to localhost
4.4 Cross-Site Request Forgery
GET /post-by-aaron HTTP/1.1
Host: aaronpk.example
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Link: <http://aaronpk.example/webmention?csrf=Q0NTVhYjI0NTVkNDA3M>; rel="webmention"4.5 Limit access to protected resources
4.6 Security and Privacy Review
5. Other Considerations
5.1 Sending Webmentions from non-HTML content
5.2 Respecting cache headers on discovery
6. IANA Considerations
A. URIs for Form-Encoded Properties
source and target parameters as URIs, you can prefix the terms with http://www.w3.org/ns/webmention#.B. Extensions
B.1 Vouch
B.2 Salmention
B.3 Private Webmention
C. Resources
C.1 Articles
C.2 Implementations
D. Acknowledgements
E. Change Log
E.1 Changes from 24 May 2016 CR to this version
link and a tags in HTML documentsE.2 Changes from 29 April 2016 WD to 24 May 2016 CR
E.3 Changes from 20 April 2016 WD to 29 April 2016 WD
E.4 Changes from 29 March 2016 WD to 20 April 2016 WD
E.5 Changes from 1 March 2016 WD to 29 March 2016 WD
E.6 Changes from 12 January 2016 FPWD to 1 March 2016 WD
F. References
F.1 Normative references
file: URLs or operating on URLs that would be syntax errors under the [RFC3986] [RFC3987] syntax).F.2 Informative references
1.1 Social Web Working Group
This section is non-normative.
Webmention is one of several related specifications being produced by the Social Web Working Group. Implementers interested in alternative approaches and complimentary protocols should start by reading the overview document [social-web-protocols].