[uf-new] Re: Comment Questions

Fri Nov 14 11:26:13 PST 2008

Martin McEvoy wrote:
> Having said that I am thinking re-use XFN rel-contact for this link
> type, and use rel-bookmark for backwards compatibility with existing
> parsers

The XFN definition says that rel=contact is for people you know how 
to contact. I certainly don't know how to contact everyone who 
comments on my blog.
I think the *best* way to indicate that a particular hentry 
represents a comment would be to rel-tag it as "Comment", but as rel- 
tags tend to be visible, that's not in keeping with current 
publishing practice. So class="comment" on the hentry or 
class="comments" on the hfeed makes more sense to me. I'd probably 
slightly prefer the former, as it allows for non-comments to also be 
included in the hfeed (e.g. "updated" messages, pingbacks, etc).
> contact could be parsed as the in-reply-to Atom Threading Extension
> (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685).

Actually a good alternative to rel="in-reply-to" for describing a 
hierarchy of comments might be rel="up" to indicate a link to a 
comment further up the hierarchy. rel="up" is not standardised in 
HTML 4.01, but is widely used, and included in the current HTML5 drafts.
-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail at tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>