View source for comment-brainstorming

= Brainstorming for a Comment Microformat =
{{TOC-right}}

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 ==
* [[User:Csarven|Sarven Capadisli]]
* [[User:Singpolyma|Singpolyma]]
* [[User:WebOrganics|Martin McEvoy]]
* [http://blogmatrix.blogmatrix.com/ David Janes]

== Discovered Elements ==

Based on the analysis of 25 real world examples of a comment, the results can be found at the [[comment-examples#Analysis| 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
**# http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom#Entry_Author

* '''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 
**#  http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom#Entry_Content
  
* '''updated''' (date) 100%
** use the [[datetime-design-pattern]] to encode the updated datetime 
**# http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom#Entry_Updated

* '''contact''' (comment-link) 40%
**  Someone you know how to get in touch with, [[rel-contact]] is a two way link type ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry symmetric]), comments on a web page are generally a way of contact between the author of a page and the publisher of a comment. 
**# http://gmpg.org/xfn/11#contact 
**# A parser could parse this link type as the in-reply-to [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685 Atom Threading Extension].
**# The <code>section</code> link type is used to determine the difference between a comment and an article or blog post

Example:

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

===Summary===

This proposal means that on the whole nothing new is needed for a [[comment]] microformat, just use [[hatom|hAtom]], but instead of using [[rel-bookmark]] use [http://gmpg.org/xfn/11 XFN] [[rel-contact]].

==Feedback==

If we can indicate that the hAtom entries are also comments, we could add an indicator beside hAtom.
<pre><nowiki>
<div class="hfeed hcomment">

hAtom pattern goes here.

</div>
</nowiki>
</pre>

Alternatively, we could add <code>hcomment</code> with <code>hentry</code> to indicate that the following hentry can be treated also as a comment.
<pre><nowiki>
<div class="hentry hcomment">

hEntry pattern goes here.

</div>
</nowiki></pre>
--[[User:Csarven|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" [[User:Singpolyma|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 [http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom 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 [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685#section-3 in-reply-to] from [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685 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: 
<pre><nowiki>
<a rel="in-reply-to" href="#comment_20080902144745">Parent</a>
</nowiki></pre>

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 [http://microformats.org/wiki/mfcomment], [http://microformats.org/wiki/hcomment], [http://microformats.org/wiki/comment-brainstorming].

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

--[[User:Csarven|Sarven Capadisli]] 21:25, 3 Oct 2008 (PDT)