Navarr's Tech Side The Technical Side of my Life

Needed: An Open-Protocol System for Commenting on the Web

One thing that many blogs have embraced is the trackback system for blogs to shout out to other blogs that they’re linking to them or using their information.  This is a wonderful idea, and a similar solution should be applied to comments.

Now, I’m not fully up to speed with micro-formats and RDF, and such, but such a system should be easy to create and implement.  The first thing we should do is extend RSS to include it.  We already have the <comments> tag, which should obviously link to an RSS feed of comments for the item (using this new system, anyway.)  So we need to add a <postComment> tag, yes?

This tag could go in either the <channel> element (for Comment-Streams) or in the <item> element (for news-streams and/or as a direct reply to other comments).  Lets break it down something like this:

   1: <postComment method="post">

   2:     <link>http://www.example.org/postComment.php</link>

   3:     <input type="hidden" name="newsID" value="12345" />

   4:     <input type="text" name="name" required="true" />

   5:     <input type="text" name="email" required="true" />

   6:     <textarea name="comment" />

   7:     <captcha>

   8:         <link>http://www.example.org/captcha/render.php</link>

   9:         <desc>How many kittens are in the picture?</desc>

  10:     </captcha>

  11: </postComment>

This would allow a large amount of customization for systems that have different fields without too much change needed.  Just an extension to the current RSS spec.  Essentially something similar could be done.  What are your thoughts, improvements, and ideas for this?