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.

Tools

WordPress

• http://wordpress.org

• • comment_ID
  • comment_author
  • comment_author_IP
  • comment_author_email
  • comment_author_link
  • comment_type
  • comment_text
  • comment_excerpt
  • comment_date
  • comment_time

pMachine

• http://pmachine.com

• • body
  • date
  • name
  • location
  • url
  • email
  • profile_link
  • member_total_comments

Expression Engine

• http://pmachine.com

• • {author_id}
  • {comment}
  • {comment_id}
  • {ip_address}
  • {name}
  • {permalink}
  • {url}
  • {url_or_email}

Expression Engine includes many additional comments templates tags. This list excludes the following tags: tags used to display user data (instant message handles, location, occupation, etc.), tags which are used for navigation within EE-based blogs or websites, tags which deal with comment presentation (alternating background colors between comments), and custom member tags (which are defined by individual sites.)

Drupal

• http://drupal.org

• • $comment->new
  • $comment->subject
  • $comment->cid
  • $comment->nid
  • $comment->timestamp
  • $submitted
  • $comment
  • $picture
  • $content
  • $links

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.