xmlhack: Talk back to XMLhack

We've added a commenting facility to xmlhack, so now you can add extra information and questions to the bottom of each article.

Just go for the "Comment on this article" link, which appears at the bottom of each page. The discussions are threaded, so you can respond to somebody else's comment.

Congratulations to Dan Brickley, who was the first to use this new facility.

When you compose a comment with a URL in it and only part of the URL is previewed ( http://www.guymacon.com/FUN/INSULT/INDEX.HTM - if I counted the characters right the URL I just wrote should demonstrate the effect) only part of the URL above is shown in the preview and the software makes the partial URL into an invalid link.

Guy Macon, electrical engineer http://www.guymacon.com/HOME/INDEX.HTM

The Quercus package, from http://www.caucho.com , also implements this sort of function. It's pretty cool -- basically, a servlet that adds/indexes comments based on an arbitrary string. Any ability to make comments in context is quite nice.

Of course, someone will figure out how to embed a WikiWiki engine in this way, and we'll be able to spin off on tangent after tangent.

You might want to add something early on clarifying ownership of comments submitting to the site. This would clear the way for syndicating article summaries alongside commentary material -- eg. using the proposed Slash extension module for RSS, see http://www.egroups.com/message/rss-dev/1382 ). I remember some fuss on Slashdot about ownership of comments which might be avoided with an "I consent to content syndication" checkbox or somesuch.

Some nits:

From the article, the "Comment on this article | See NN comment" doesn't seem to set off or highlight the comments very well.

From a comment, there's no setting off of the reply at all.

A nice feature would be "(XX comments)" next to the "Read more" link on the front page.

Ideas for future work on the forums include:

* mailback facility so you get emailed when somebody replies to your post

* RSS generation, so portals can keep track of discussion threads at XMLhack