[uf-new] Re: Comment Questions

[David Janes]

On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 5:57 PM, Toby A Inkster <mail at tobyinkster.co.uk> wrote:
> Scott Reynen wrote:
>
>> On [Nov 16], at [ Nov 16] 2:33 , Toby A Inkster wrote:
>>
>> > Imagine the following comments:
>> >
>> > - Comment A to the main article at 1:00 pm.
>> > - Comment B to the main article at 2:00 pm.
>> > - Comment C in reply to comment A at 3:00 pm.
>> > - Comment D in reply to comment B at 4:00 pm.
>>
>> Where did you see this on the web?
>
> I've updated the comments-examples page and redone the analysis for the
> existing pages, as some features such as pagination links, nested reply
> structures were not examined in the first run round, but can be found on
> many of the pages. 16% of pages with comments use explicit, visible links
> from comments to the thing being commented on.
>
> Off the web, in the more general case, Usenet and mailing lists are the kind
> of place where multiple threaded conversations are interleaved and may be
> chronologically intermingled. That is why Usenet and e-mail messages
> typically include in-reply-to headers - to figure out what a message is in
> reply to, as it is usually not the preceding message in a chronological
> sense.

This a reply to your previous example enumerated A-B-C-D example also.

OK, but now we're not talking about "a comment" or "comments" any
more. I'm totally cool with saying "let's discuss distributed
threading", but then let's actually explicitly do that -- but I expect
the scope of that is _much_ larger. This is actually one of my
smell-test issues with rel=in-reply-to ... it looks like something
much more substantial is trying to be brought in through the back door
without case justification.

As per the example, as Scott mentioned, it would be better if this was
illuminated by real-world examples. All the sites that, off-the-cuff,
remember ever showing "comment-x is a reply to comment-y" show this
with nested structure.

Regards, etc...

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