- The Frames Protocol, also called Farcaster Frames, is a simple web-based technology used for making applications. + The Frames Protocol, also known Farcaster Frames, is a simple web-based technology used for making applications.
++ Although the Frames Protocol could be used outside of Farcaster, at the time of writing, Farcaster clients are the only major (client-side) platform to support it. +
+ ++ Before we get into the Frames Protocol let's quickly go over Farcaster — since the Frames Protocol originated with Farcaster. +
++ Farcaster is a decentralized social-media network — and is similar in many ways to other decentralized social-media networks, such as + the Fediverse (which includes Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Misskey, Lemmy, Kbin, GreatApe, Akkoma, etc), + and + Bluesky. +
++ And in particular, Farcaster is a micro-blogging social-media network platform. +
++ The most famous micro-blogging social-media network platform is Twitter.. + But the Fediverse's Mastodon, Akkoma, Misskey, Pleroma and others are also micro-blogging social-media network platforms. + And so too is Bluesky. +
++ All of these (including Farcaster) are similar to Twitter.. +
++ One of the main language of the Web is HTML. +
++ HTML looks like this: +
+
+The following is <b>bold</b> and <a href="http://example.com/">this</a> is a link.
++ Although typically, HTML comes as a whole page (rather than a fragment), and thus usually looks more like this: +
+
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+ <head>
+ <meta charset="utf-8" /<
+ <title>An Example</title>
+ </head>
+ <body>
+
+ <p>
+ The following is <b>bold</b> and <a href="http://example.com/">this</a> is a link.
+ </p>
+
+ </body>
+</html>
++ The Frames Protocol actually only uses a tiny part of HTML. +
++ When creating a Frames Protocol application, you can effectively ignore almost all of HTML except for one HTML element — the HTML <meta> element. +
++ The Frames Protocol only uses the HTML <meta> element. + And it (the Frames Protocol) uses the HTML <meta> element in a very particular way. +
++ The HTML <meta> element has been around since the 1990s. +
++ If you look at the old HTMLIETC RFC-1866 in section 5.2.5.), which was created back in the 1990s, you can see how the HTML <meta> element was defined back then. +
++ The Frames Protocol usage of the HTML <meta> element takes inspiration from the OpenGraph protocol. +
++ Here is an example of the OpenGraph protocol: +
+
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+ <head>
+ <meta charset="utf-8" /<
+
+
+ <meta property="og:title" content="Hello world!" />
+ <meta property="og:type" content="article" />
+ <meta property="og:image" content="/images/4aigvXF62jMY8iRzFN8x.jpeg" />
+ <meta property="og:url" content="http://www.example.com/article/hello-world.xhtml" />
+
+
+ <title>An Example</title>
+ </head>
+ <body>
+
+ <p>
+ The following is <b>bold</b> and <a href="http://example.com/">this</a> is a link.
+ </p>
+
+ </body>
+</html>
++ Since there is a lot of HTML code there, let's just focus on the OpenGraph part of it: +
+
+ <meta property="og:title" content="Hello world!" />
+ <meta property="og:type" content="article" />
+ <meta property="og:image" content="/images/4aigvXF62jMY8iRzFN8x.jpeg" />
+ <meta property="og:url" content="http://www.example.com/article/hello-world.xhtml" />
++ It is rather simple. + It is just name-value pairs. +
+