Anil Dash blogged recently about adapting the embedding method used for rich media on personal / blog / social sites (most common use case: embedding a YouTube video on a MySpace page) to simple text quoting. He has added an embed code to each of his entries and I’m going to paste it in, inside a blockquote tag pair, at the end of this post.
His commenters talk about how re-blogging hasn’t really taken off. This was one solid feature of Radio Userland, although I didn’t like the way it would quote directly, with no offset, which led to people naively presenting quoted content as if it were their own.
This may be technical overkill or a brilliant way to take advantage of existing folkways and habits. For now, I’m just participating in the experiment:
I used to wonder why there wasn’t a primitive in HTML which would do for text what <img> does for images. Back in the day I used to build things around server-side includes that could have been done more efficiently with a client-side include.
Probably the answer is that in those simpler times the creators of HTML wanted to avoid the innumerable security, performance and implementation headaches that have come with javascript/AJAX, etc.
um.. link to anil’s post?
Well, it’s the post in the embed, but I can add another link to it to the main body of the post.
(and now have done so…)
I was reading this in Google Reader, and wasn’t quite sure what you were talking about until i clicked through - it seems that the embedded post doesn’t get displayed (I can’t tell myself if it’s not in the feed, or just that the reader strips out the javascript, but after using a couple of viewers, i suspect it’s the former) …