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June 14, 2003
Referrers Aren't TrackBack
The Daring Fireball weblog complains about TrackBack:
"[T]here are ways to track links that are much simpler than TrackBack. Referrers, for one. When you follow a link from one web page to another, your browser includes referrer information in the HTTP headers of the request. The referrer should be the URL of the page from which you came; if you click on any of the links in this article, for example, the web site you’re heading to will get a referrer from this page at daringfireball.net. " [link via Scripting News]
TrackBack of course, is the notification technology created by Six Apart. Daring Fireball has created his own referrers script that list referring websites. In doing so he illustrates the fault of his logic.
Although even Six Apart defines it as such, TrackBack is not really "designed to provide a method of notification between websites." It is has been designed to provides a method of notification between weblog posts. And a "site" is not a "post."
Look at the list of referrers at the bottom of John's post . Note that the top referrers this morning are:
blogdex.media.mit.edu/
www.scripting.com/
www.kottke.org/
www.dashes.com/anil/
kottke.org/
scripting.com/
Ignore for a moment the inefficiency of all the duplicates. Briefly note the fact that the referrers link to the home page of the weblog (which is where the post is today), instead of to the permalink for the individual post that references the Daring Fireball site. TrackBack would have taken you to the post itself.
Now ruminate for a little longer on where these referrers will lead you in a week or two. If you go to each of those sites, you'll find a link on their page today to the Daring Fireball article. In a week or two, the referrer will still point to the top page of Scripting.com or Kottke.org, but the weblog post referencing the Daring Fireball site will have rotated off the front page. At that point the referrer link is useless -- it doesn't get you to the information you're looking for, the comment on the Daring Fireball post.
Weblogs are not websites. Weblogs are defined as "a collection of discrete, dated entries that are organized sequentially in time and published to the World Wide Web." Referrers are page to page tracking, but cannot take into account the discrete structural elements -- posts -- on a given page.
TrackBack solves a specific need of weblogs that referrers cannot: post to post referral.
Posted June 14, 2003 07:49 AM