@pointlessone@status.pointless.one short answer: oEmbed requires JS for publishers and consumers.
Longer:
For me, "simple" means a little HTML is all you need. I was inspired to come up with something that anyone could create with (existing) HTML text files. Zero imperative code.
Simple HTML also means easier / better support for static file hosting solutions.
E.g. if your website is on GitHub Pages or other static site hosting, you can’t implement an oEmbed endpoint (certainly not without an external service, which has other problems).
Whereas plain old semantic HTML (POSH^1) works great on GitHub Pages or other static site hosting.
Would be interesting to see if someone can build an oEmbed "shim" service that did discovery on rel=embed and then translated h-entry into oEmbed’s specific JSON vocabulary.
That way publishers would have less work to do (with plain HTML) and existing oEmbed consumers would support embedding more publishers.
^1 https://microformats.org/wiki/posh
Last week at a #HomebrewWebsiteClub session^1 I pointed out that I was working on implementing a “simple” way to support embeds of my notes, that is, make my short notes embeddable, like how people embed tweets or toots.
I noted that to keep it as simple as possible while being flexible to implementation changes, I planned to implement three things:
1. A separate “embed” version of my post permalinks, with just the entry information (no header, nav, search, sidebar, footer etc.), embeddable via copy/paste or an iframe.
2. A way to “Follow Your Nose” discover that separate embed version
3. A way to discover the original post from the embedded version
For (1) a minimal h-entry, with perhaps a little bit of inline CSS would suffice.
For (2) I proposed using “rel=embed” which I’ve subsequently written up briefly^2.
For (3) The obvious existing answer is rel=canonical link from the embed version to the canonical post permalink.
Soon thereafter, several folks in the #IndieWeb community went ahead and implemented such embeds for their own sites, and even the https://libre.fm/ open scrobbling service!
https://indieweb.org/embed#IndieWeb_Examples
I have yet to implement it myself, and that’s fine. This is one of the things I appreciate about the community, we can share our plans and ideas for improving things on our own sites, and if someone else does it first, that's great! We celebrate it and explore the solution space together.
Got other ideas for simple embeds? Want to implement them on your own site?
Join us in the #indiewebdev chat: https://chat.indieweb.org/dev
UPDATE: What about oEmbed? tl;dr: oEmbed requires JS and backend code, more work and unsuitable for embeds from static site hosting (like GitHub pages).
A simple HTML method is accessible to many more independent publishers and easier to implement. More: https://tantek.com/2024/306/t2
Glossary
embed
https://indieweb.org/embed
Follow Your Nose
https://indieweb.org/follow_your_nose
h-entry
https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry
oEmbed
https://indieweb.org/oEmbed
rel-canonical
https://indieweb.org/rel-canonical
static site hosting
https://indieweb.org/static_web_hosting
References
^1 https://indieweb.org/events/2024-10-23-hwc-europe#embedding
^2 https://indieweb.org/rel-embed
This is post 27 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
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