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Semantics of comments

Most weblogs provide users the possibility to leave comments. Comments on weblog posts even have their own Comment API. Dimitri Glazkov started a discussion on his blog on the semantics of comments. He proposes to regard comment entries as definition lists (dl).

To me it is difficult to consider one comment as a list of definitions. I think it’s better to conceive a comment as a (small) article on it’s own. Therefore I would propose the following HTML for comments:


	<div class="comments">
		<h3>
			<a href="permalink">Comment Title</a>
		</h3>
		<p class="author">

			<a href="mailto:authorEmail">Author Name</a>
		</p>
		<p class="source">
			<a href="authorSiteUrl">Author Site</a>
		</p>

		<p class="description">
			Text of the comment
		</p>
	</div>

Some remarks:

  • The wrapper-div is arbitrary. It depends on your markup if you want to use it.
  • The header element h3 is also arbitrary. It depends on your markup whether you need a h2, h3 or something else.
  • Depending on your markup, you could get rid off some classes too.

I realise that our open.info.nl blog tool WordPress offers another definition. Maybe it’s time to change it?

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Dit bericht was geplaatst door Tom op Friday 22 July 2005 om 8:44 uur en is gearchiveerd onder semantische web, webstandaarden. Je kan de reacties hierop volgen via de RSS 2.0 feed. Je kan een bericht achterlaten, maar pingen en trackback is niet mogelijk.

4 Reacties op “Semantics of comments”

  1. Anne zegt:
    op Friday 22 July 2005 om 13:10

    This does not seem to cover lists, quotes, code blocks, multi paragraphs and a lot of other type of comments.

  2. Tom zegt:
    op Friday 22 July 2005 om 13:38

    Good point, Anne. I suppose you mean the case when a user inserts HTML (which is not always possible)? In that case you probably want to replace the paragraph tag I introduced for the comment description, with a list tag, a blockquote etc. You could check serverside if the comment description needs a wrapper-paragraph.

    I think this even more supports my idea that comments should be regarded as articles on their own.

  3. Dimitri Glazkov zegt:
    op Friday 22 July 2005 om 15:08

    Guys, another good resource for more thinking is the microformats comments discussion:

    http://microformats.org/wiki/comments-formats

    At the moment, there are two proposals (nothing solid yet, I think)

    http://microformats.org/wiki/mfcomment
    http://microformats.org/wiki/hcomment

  4. werutzb zegt:
    op Wednesday 8 October 2008 om 2:58

    Hi!

    I want to extend my SQL knowledge.
    I red so many SQL resources and want to
    read more about SQL for my work as oracle database manager.

    What can you recommend?

    Thanks,
    Werutz

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