I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve seen paying customers be offered no other choice but a javascript snippet to embed on their site, like it’s 1999 and we’re still crafting HTML files by hand.
The OEmbed specification has been around since 2008, and is a wonderfully simple idea:
A user should only ever care about their content’s URL, how to embed the content into your content management system or platform should be abstracted away from the user.
You’ve seen this before, pasting a YouTube link, automagically embeds a YouTube player onto the page.
The mechanism to this is simple, basically your YouTube page contains a tag that helps discover how to represent the content, embedding an iFrame, etc.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/json+oembed" .../>Obviously not everyone is using wordpress, only like 40% of the web, but seriously, even in react-land there are libraries for this.
Maybe the reason is something like the cake mix story, where customers were unsatisfied feeling the recipe was too easy, so the cake mix recipe was altered to require manually adding an egg. This proved to be enough to make customers feel they’d actually participated in making the cake.
What do you think? Does adding a snippet improve your authoring experience? Or would you prefer to just paste a link and get on with it?
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