comment-brainstorming

Brainstorming for a Comment Microformat

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

Contributors

• Sarven Capadisli
• Singpolyma
• Martin McEvoy

Discovered Elements

Based on the analysis of 25 real world examples, 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:

• contributor (author)100%
  • "atom:contributor" a person or other entity who contributed to the entry or feed.
    1. http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.contributor
    2. Contents are either text or a valid hcard

• 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%
  • The "atom:updated" element is a Date construct indicating the most recent instant in time when an entry or feed was modified in a way the publisher considers significant.
    1. http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#rfc.section.4.2.15

• related (comment-link) 40%
  • related: A document related to the entry or feed.
    1. http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/index.php#link

• item (a container element for a comment)

Example:

<div class="item" id="comment-001">
  <span class="contributor vcard">
    <a class="url fn" href="http://contributor.com/blog/">Contributor</span> said on 
  </span>
  <abbr class="updated" title="2008-01-01T00:00:00+00:00">1st, Jan 2008</abbr>.
  <span class="entry-content">Happy New Year</span>
  <a rel="related" 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 Route

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].

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