David Janes wrote:
On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 3:39 PM, Martin McEvoy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I am beginning to think that the scope is a little narrow, but I think that
(for now) If we (the community) attempt to solve the simplest problem(just a
comment), in a way that everyone can agree on, then that will give us room
to expand the scope a little more to include other situations.
Ignoring the fact that comments occur in groups is contrary to the
problem statement [1]
[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/comment-problem
David I dont see how? by solving the simplest problem, in the simplest
way has always been a priority when developing a new microformat (I
don't need to tell you that).
I will explain....
Problem.
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 way that can be pragmatically represented, then
ingested into some kind of datastore, searched or aggregated?
Desirable behaviours
* I post a comment to a blog, and want to monitor responses made to
my comment - but I don't want to have to visit the website
regularly to manually check for reponses
* I want to monitor all comments published to my blog in my newsreader
* I want to be able to be alerted when someone posts a comment to my
favourite blog
ALL the above can be solved using hAtom eg:
<div class="hfeed">
<div class="hentry">
[the article entry]
</div>
<div class="hentry">
[first comment]
</div>
<div class="hentry">
[second comment]
</div>
</div>
If the Article and the comments are syndicated as a single feed, say to
Google reader the user will be able to monitor comments made on article
they were reading because the "updated" values will change as comments
are made and will appear in chronological order, the last updated
comment will be the most recent comment made on that article, the feed
reader can update the page automatically and notify the user when a new
comment is made.
I don't believe that the topic(the article), and the discussion(the
comments) should be separated or be presented in different feeds,
because some people(like me) subscribe to lots of feeds, If my feeds
JUST contained comments after a while I would need to be refreshed about
what the topic was an have to re-visit the page just to be brought up to
speed with what is going on, It would be better if I could just go back
to the first entry in my feed an re-read it again, What is an important
factor in all this is we shouldn't break the line of conversation, its
counter intuitive because It makes a user (possibly) subscribe to two
feed instead of one.
All the above solves the problem of "a comment" you don't need anything
else.
The last problem that needs to be resolved is "what if I want to
subscribe to just comments?", that came up in our recent discussions.
Easy(I would say) just tag the hEntrys in some way to say this is a
comment, "hentry comment" is the easiest thing to do by far, you could
even use "item hentry" (which is very "microformaty") but I think I
would have a hard time explaining that, you could do "hfeed comments"
but that has drawbacks, first ALL microformats are Nouns, Singular you
would have to describe in in some other way like "comment-list" or
something, also the "hfeed" element in hAtom is optional in fact it
would be interesting to know how many hAtom authors actually use the
hfeed element as it makes no difference if you include it or not,
version 0.2 of hatom could really do with dropping it as it seems
entirely presentational and confining.
There is a small matter of rel="reply" as it seems to have more uses in
a more general term, I think there is a good case for rev="reply" for
all those web pages you see that start off with...
"I read this article on <a rev="reply"
href="http://somecoolsite.com";>cool site</a> and this is my response...."
...or something along those lines. A rev reply link is ideal in these
situations and would say that "this page" has a reply to cool
site(http://somecoolsite.com), any way I am sure there is plenty of
evidence of behaviour like that enough for a separate proposal, and
good discussion about un-grandfathering rev in microformats ;-)
Thank you.
--
Martin McEvoy
http://weborganics.co.uk/
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