* James M Snell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-07-12 21:55]:
> What you describe is actually the way we currently integrate
> comments into feeds in the internal IBM blogging
> infrastructure: Entries and Comments are integrated into a
> single feed.
Great to know that there’s precedent for this as well as for the
scenario with a separate feed list (as I mention below).
> Currently there is no way of associating (with metadata) a
> comment to it's entry however. The only connection is that the
> title of the comment entry uses the "re:" naming scheme
> commonly used for email replies. If we can come up with a way
> of marking comment entries as comments and providing a
> meaningful link back to the original entry, then this method
> would definitely be workable.
As occured to me while replying to Antone Roudy, since atom:id
contains an URI and atom:link/@href must contain an URI, this
could simply be solved with a link included in comments:
<entry>
<link rel="in-reply-to" href="{$original-entry/atom:id}" />
<!-- ... -->
</entry>
That seems to me to a very elegant solution to the issue that
requires minimal work on the Atom parser level to support and
keeps with the spirit of Atom. It’s “Atom-ish”, if you will (en
lieu of the “Perl-ish” that gets thrown around a lot where I come
from :-) ).
> Another alternative would be to follow the model Sam Ruby uses in his
> blog. That is, produce a single feed for all comments
> (http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/comments.rss2).
This is actually very common already. I can think of a half dozen
weblogs from my subscription list off the top of my head which
offer such a comments feed.
> The comments link could then be included on the feed level
> rather than the entry level. A single comments feed for a
> single main entries feed. The comments feed would include the
> same mechanisms for associating the comment to the original
> entry that we would use in the single feed solution.
Yep, exactly. The structure basically suggests itself.
As I said in the previous mail, it might also be worth specifying
a link relation for pointing to a feed with *both* entries and
comments where available, so that a thread-aware aggregator can
switch subscription over to it, only needing to poll a single
feed.
> It is entirely possible to use a combination of these approaches.
Indeed.
I am liking this a lot.
Regards,
--
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
