Correct Approach to Comments?

By Twisted Intellect on September 23, 2006 8:20 AM | | Comments (141)

How should one approach comments, in code? What are comments, semantically? And how do we define them, and still make them easy to style?

The DIVs

There are many approaches to comments, it seams. The most common seams to be just hacking up a series of DIVs.

Admittedly, it’s what I did on this design. Luckily, I’m not alone. Cameron Moll, Mike Davidson, Dave Shea, Simon Collison, Wolfgang Bartelme all do the same thing.

But that doesn’t make it right, of course. DIV stands for division, and even though each comment is in itself a separate element, it feels more logical to group them together in a wrapper DIV.

So are they...

...definitions?

Shaun Inman, Dan Cederholm and Douglas Bowman have all gone for definition lists in the style of:

<dl>

<dt>[Userlink] wrote:</dt>

<dd>[Comment]</dd>

</dl>

This method certainly looks better. And it sort of feels more right as well. But even though we could say that the comment is the definition of what the user wrote — it still isn’t something I’d dare to hand my English teacher.

Blockquotes?

I have yet to see anyone use an array of blockquote and cite-tags to define comments — and though I can see how it would be semantically supercorrect, it still uses many separate tags, which are not ‘held together’ in any way. Of course, you could (and probably would) glue it together with DIVs,— but then you’d be stuck in the same tagsoup as with using only DIVs.

Lists

Very few people seem to be using li for comments. Understandable in the respect that it is slightly more ‘clumsy’, and it doesn’t feel as semantic as the definition lists.

But isn’t it more correct, nevertheless? For aren’t comments simply an array of people’s views? And isn’t it more correct to collect all these views in one wrapping object, instead of many?

So what about the userlink?

<h4>? <span>? <strong>? I’d say <h4> would be the way to go, but that’s just me... The userlink is not a division of the page, nor is it a paragraph. It is not a term that needs defining and even though it is a cite-source, it’s main, practical function is still as a headline. A headline in a list, that is.

Speaking of comments — feel free to add some! :P

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