comment-brainstorming

Brainstorming for a Comment Microformat

This is a brainstorm for comment microformat. Examples of a comment can be found here comment-examples

Problem

Shortform: How do you track blog comments you've made?

Longform: How do track the comments you have made on blogs, comments made on blogs your interested in and comments other people have made on your own blog?

How can you do this in a pragmatic way, ingested into some kind of data store, searched or aggregated?

Contributors

• Sarven Capadisli
• Singpolyma
• Martin McEvoy

Discovered Elements

Based on the analysis of 25 real world examples of a comment, the results can be found at the Comment Analysis section

The following properties occur most regularly across all examples (92% or more)

• author (name)100%
• comment (text) 100%
• published (date) 100%
• author-url (href) 92%

Other achievable elements

• comment-link (a permalink) 40%

Schema

Proposal:

• hentry (a container element for a comment entry)

• author (author)100%
  • an Entry Author element MUST be encoded in an hCard
    1. http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom#Entry_Author
    2. an Entry Author element SHOULD be encoded in an <address> element

• url (author-url) 92%
  • Use the url value of a hcard

• entry-content (comment) 100%
  • The "logical Entry Content" of an Entry is the concatenation, in order of appearance, of all the Entry Contents within the Entry
    1. http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom#Entry_Content

• updated (date) 100%
  • use the datetime-design-pattern to encode the updated datetime
    1. http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom#Entry_Updated

• section (comment-link) 40%
  • section: to indicate that the href attribute of a link is a section of the current page.
    1. http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#h-6.12
    2. A parser could parse this link type as either (depending on context and usage):
       • The Atom related link type(for atom conformity)
       • in-reply-to Atom Threading Extension

Example:

<div class="hentry" id="comment-001">
   <address class="author vcard">
       <span class="entry-title"><a class="url fn" href="http://contributor.com/blog/">Author</a> said</span>
   </address>
   about <abbr class="updated" title="2008-09-01T14:40:45+01:00">72 days ago</abbr>, 
   <div class="entry-content">
      <p>Hey Great Post</p>
    </div>
   <a rel="section" href="#comment-001">link to this</a>
</div>

Feedback

If we can indicate that the hAtom entries are also comments, we could add an indicator beside hAtom.

<div class="hfeed hcomment">

hAtom pattern goes here.

</div>

Alternatively, we could add hcomment with hentry to indicate that the following hentry can be treated also as a comment.

<div class="hentry hcomment">

hEntry pattern goes here.

</div>

--Sarven Capadisli 11:59, 25 Sep 2008 (PDT)

• If an hfeed is embedded in an hEntry, that could be enough context to show "these items are replies to the one they're embedded in" singpolyma 12:20, 25 Sep 2008 (PDT)

hAtom and in-reply-to

A user comment (e.g., in blogs, wikis, forms) can be marked as an hAtom since it has a similar content pattern. A way to differentiate an hEntry (e.g., a blog post) from another hEntry (e.g., a user comment) can be done reusing in-reply-to from Atom Threading Extensions. It provides a mechanism to indicate that an entry is a response to another resource. rel="in-reply-to" can indicate that the current hEntry is a reply to another hEntry and has a reference point @href:

<a rel="in-reply-to" href="#comment_20080902144745">Parent</a>

hEntries that use rel="in-reply-to" can be considered as a comment entry in response to a parent entry in the threaded conversation (e.g., in blogs, wikis, forms).

hEntries that are chronologically listed can all use rel="in-reply-to" and refer to the root hEntry (e.g., blog post, form post)

By reusing in-reply-to, we can solve the microformats representation for user comments [1], [2], [3].

Example comment using in-reply-to: http://www.csarven.ca/my-responses-are-in-white

--Sarven Capadisli 21:25, 3 Oct 2008 (PDT)