(Up to: Ideas Conversation Is AFlow )

Page for a new-style, bespoke commenting system here on Exmosis.

Exmosis is intended as a half-brain dump, half-formal rant kind of site. It was originally conceived as a place to stick down a lot of my thoughts without having to worry too much about anything. This was before Wikis became commonplace (at least in my sphere of attention) and so the site has developed, well, as intended.

However, it would now be nice to start getting feedback and discussion around some of the ideas here, and as such, needs a mechanism to allow this. I have kicked the idea of a Wiki around, but decided that I would like to retain control over my own words. This is a philosophical decision rather than a technical one, and on some levels is actually quite arbitrary. Perhaps this is some deep-down psychological concern about the type of people I may or may not attract to this site :)

I would also, though, like to avoid simple "add a comment" at the end of the page, as I feel that this would make it harder to refer to specific points within text, especially with some of the more "formal" pieces.

My current thinking is to use a little bit of Javascript to allow readers to choose which part of the page a comment should be attached to. This is a bit like having, say, an Annotea server, but within the site rather than external to it. An overview:

1. User selects text to add a comment to.
2. User presses "add/attach comment".
3. User enters comment and submits.
4. When page is displayed in future, a link gets displayed by the text to take the reader to the comment for that text, either via a pop-up, or by jumping to the bottom of the page (could be user-definable even).
5. Users can still add a comment to a page by not selecting any text. Also avoids any show-stopping Javascript problems.

In addition, comments could actually be made to be nodes of their very own, allowing them to be referenced individually, and letting people add further comments as wanted.

Comments? Oh, wait a mo... ;)