Does anyone understand WordPress HTML5?

Technology Software
1

We saw a huge amount of traffic to the site we host for the Land Workers Alliance today:

https://twitter.com/webarchcoop/status/1118490202400526337

This is the HTML code that appears to have generated most of it:

<figure class="wp-block-embed-wordpress wp-block-embed is-type-wp-embed is-provider-the-landworkers-039-alliance"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content" data-secret="6PeDswTLyX"><a href="https://landworkersalliance.org.uk/">Home</a></blockquote><iframe class="wp-embedded-content" sandbox="allow-scripts" security="restricted" style="position: absolute; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);" src="https://landworkersalliance.org.uk/embed/#?secret=6PeDswTLyX" data-secret="6PeDswTLyX" width="500" height="282" title="&#8220;Home&#8221; &#8212; The Landworkers&#039; Alliance" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
</div></figure>

All it appear to result in is a hyperlink to the homepage, all that appears to be rendered is simply the inner a element:

<a href="https://landworkersalliance.org.uk/">Home</a>

I know my way around HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 but haven’t been following the HTML5 developments over the last few years, so I was wondering if anyone could explain the point of the <figure>, <blockquote> or <iframe> in this context? What am I missing here?

2

The iframe is embedding a WordPress generated HTTP 301 redirect:

lynx -head -dump "https://landworkersalliance.org.uk/embed/#?secret=6PeDswTLyX"
HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2019 10:13:55 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.25
Location: https://landworkersalliance.org.uk/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

The frag id, #?secret=6PeDswTLyX is lost with the redirect, I’m still completed failing to understand the point of this, other than to cause the whole of the Land Workers Alliance front page to be loaded by clients (but not displayed!), does anyone have any other suggestions?

All I can think of to explain this is that it is a intentional (or accidental?) pre-loading of all linked web pages, if this is the case then the main effect will be a huge increase in bandwidth usage for all users of the rebellion.earth website and this will, of course have had a substantial electricity requirement… :roll_eyes:

3

But who would want to slow down Extinction Rebellion’s website !!?? :wink:

4

I’m not sure you understand the above, the Extinction Rebellion site is hosting <iframes> that load sites they link to without people visiting them, this doesn’t slow down the Extinction Rebellion site, it causes users to load more data and this caused a massive spike of traffic for the Land Workers Alliance site on Wednesday. There is no reason to think this is intentional, I suspect is it an accident caused by the daft HTML5 generated by WordPress.

5

Ah sorry I overheard the conversation and jumped to the wrong conclusion. So is it what they might call a “client side” problem?

(…resulting from iframes and maybe WP)

6

Not really, the cause was the <iframe> hosted at this URL https://rebellion.earth/2019/04/17/11am-today-light-rail-disruption-today-to-highlight-governments-disastrous-inaction-on-climate-and-ecological-emergency/