[uf-new] Re: Comment Questions

[David Janes]

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 9:06 PM, Sarven Capadisli <csarven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 4:56 PM, Toby A Inkster <mail at tobyinkster.co.uk> wrote:
>> I've put together an experimental implementation of rel=in-reply-to and
>> class=replies. You can try it at:
>>
>> http://srv.buzzword.org.uk/
>
> That's great Toby! Having some hands on response is useful.
>
> Here is my understanding of rel="in-reply-to" and why that alone is
> sufficient to indicate that an hentry is a response to another hentry
> (anywhere). Commonly:
> * chronological comments (e.g., Wordpress)
> * threaded comments (e.g., Slashdot)
> * a blog entry as a reaction to another blog entry (e.g., Technorati)
>
> Advantages:
> * Creates a single instance of a comment [1]
> * Minimal set of requirements
> * Applicable to various forms of replies
>
> Disadvantages:
> * @id required
>
> In the wild, the requirement of @id is not an issue because it is
> already widely used in comments [2].
>
> I would like to understand what's the main reason preventing us from
> taking this route and wrapping this up. Could anyone outline the
> (dis)advantages of alternative solutions and so we can have an
> overview and compare where we are at?

Because:

1) you give an example of a single site where there's an element that
rel="in-reply-to" can be placed on; _every_ _single_ example in [1]
(as of my writing this e-mail) does not provide such an element
2) using rel="in-reply-to" A.href URIs where the URI has to be parsed
is _semantically incorrect_: it asserts a wrong fact
3) you suddenly have just tossed in "blog replies to other blog
posts", despite earlier assertions that were made in other threads
that this was about "a comment". Is this now about threading blog
posts? Where's all the research on that and alternatives research
(BLOCKQUOTE.cite, for example) that this is the best way to go?

I'm not sure how much more wrong that can be, from both a semantic
point of view and a microformats-process point of view.

BTW: Schema II [2] can cover every example listed in [1] except
Haloscan (which doesn't provide a pointer to the original post [3] and
so is pretty well undoable anyway without presentation changes) and
requires _no_ presentation changes and is semantically correct.


[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/comment-examples
[2] http://microformats.org/wiki/comment-brainstorming#Schema_II
[3] http://www.haloscan.com/comments/empirestatehuman/7424868678376349884/

-- 
David Janes
Mercenary Programmer
http://code.davidjanes.com