Danny Ayers wrote:
> The motto that spontaneously emerged on this list was
> "It's the Entries, stupid!" - comments and trackbacks are just
> entries too, only with different metadata. Is there something else here?
I strongly agree that "comments and trackbacks are just entries
too..." Given this, I'm puzzled by the various proposals that we need to
somehow incorporate recursive feeds or other structural innovations in order
to address the "comment problem." To me, a comment is just another entry
that happens to have a typed link to the entry which is its subject.
It is important, I think, to be careful not to permit too much of
our expectations concerning the display of different types of entries into
the feed format itself. While some user interfaces may display comments in a
fashion structurally different then free-standing entries, it is neither
necessary nor wise to allow these structural differences to enter into the
feed itself. Doing so will tend to limit the flexibility of the system and
opportunities to innovate in the future.
For example, if we establish the relationship between entries and
comments by doing something like providing for an embedded "comments feed"
within a feed document, we may make it difficult to allow cross-feed
comments. i.e. Allowing me to create a comment in my feed that refers to an
entry or comment in someone else's feed. I think this would be very
unfortunate since it is becoming quite apparent that the current mechanisms
for commenting are not going to be sustainable long term.
The problem with commenting as it is practiced today is that it
relies on granting others the right to write into one's blog. Because
comments and entries are collocated, in order to create a comment, one must
gain write access within the same data administration domain as the entry.
This increases the complexity of comment systems greatly -- or results the
common approach of granting global write access to comment feeds and relying
on post-write moderation of comments. (i.e I get email notifications
whenever someone comments on my blog and I then have to inspect the comment
to determine if it should be deleted.) The tremendous amount of comment spam
that we have is the result of this silliness -- open write access being
granted to our comment feeds. Spamming is much less common and much less
likely when spammers are forced to maintain their "spam" within their own
domains rather then exploiting, like parasites, the domains of others...
In the future, I think, we'll see comments being written on the
writer's blog which link to the entries or comments upon which they comment.
Thus, rather than a comment being identified as such by being an actual
insertion into the stream of updates to a feed, we'll see comments being
identified by their metadata. Thus, more and more commenting will move to a
track-back model (either explicit via mechanisms like trackback or implicit
via link tracking tools like PubSub).
To summarize: "It's about the Entries, Stupid!" Comments are just
entries that refer to other entries as their subjects. Let's not allow the
currently anecdotal aspects of commenting implementations to overly
influence the mechanisms that we define for supporting commenting.
bob wyman
