comments-formats

Discussion Participants

Authors

• Chris Messina, Round Two, Inc.

Current Comments Formats

There have been several efforts to define data formats for posting "comments" on the Web.

This page serves to document the current list of comment schemas, formats, and efforts as background for the design of a simple comments MicroFormat.

Examples from the wild

• brianstorms (movable type) (from http://www.brianstorms.com/archives/000580.html)

<div class="comments-body">
<p>Congratulations!  Any list that includes Molly Holzschlag and Wil Wheaton is certainly something... 
and that's just the Honorable Mentions.</p>

<p>Now to scrape the links of all the rest of those "people you may not know but probably should"...</p>
<span class="comments-post">Posted by: 
<a href="http://www.brianstorms.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?__mode=red&id=3826">Chris</a> 
at June 21, 2005 08:53 PM</span>
</div>

• mfComment "small" example:

 <div class="mfcomment">
    <a class="url" rel="target" href="http://an9.org/devdev/shdh2/>
    <span class="commenter">anonymous</span>
    <abbr class="dtcommented" title="20050612T21:30-0700">June 12th, 2005</abbr>
    <div class="description">
        <p>Gosh, this is neat.</p>
    </div>
    <a class="url" rel="self bookmark" href="http://sxore.com/comment/view/14">link to this comment</a>
 </div>

• CommentAPI

http://wellformedweb.org/story/9 Granted, this is not XHTML, but still should be useful as an example of expressing comments structurally.

• XOXO Blog Format (comment subset and suggested extenion to hAtom)

 <ul class="xoxo comments">
    <li id="c836428">
       Posted on <a href="COMMENT PERMALINK"</a> title="COMMENT TIMESTAMP (unix timestamp in seconds or nanoseconds)">COMMENT DATE POSTED</a>
   by <a href="AUTHOR URL" class=”author”>AUTHOR NAME</a>
      <dl>
         <dt>body</dt>
            <dd>COMMENT BODY</dd>
      </dl>
   </li>
 </ul>