TLDR: the iframes in your WordPress posts now gracefully revert to links… instead of being sanitized out.
WordPress, even before Gutenberg, in its classic tinymce based editor, had started auto-transforming plain URLs, where possible into rich content via oEmbed.
This coincided with expectations that video, audio, and other forms of rich content, were largely being created on separate platforms.
Those platforms were specializing in specific content types and creators who flocked to them benefited from the platform’s network effects.
Today the ActivityPub protocol holds the promise of a post-platform future, with Federation and Interoperability providing the Network effects.
With ActivityPub remote servers are expected to sanitize content.
In the case of oEmbed this means the iframe elements in our content will be dropped completely from remote servers.
As of the version 2.4.0, the ActivityPub plugin, thanks to yours truly, gracefully reverts Embed blocks to links instead of letting the iframe tags be sanitized out by remote servers.
Featured Image: “Caution: Cheese Hazard” by DocChewbacca is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
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