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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Does it require javascript?

If so, I'd be interested in finding yet another alternative that does not.

Allowing javascript to run in one's browser is itself a concern for both privacy and security.

The issue I see with that is making it easy to embed on sites, I don't think an iframe works well for the purpose of embedding universally. I guess you could have each button for upvoting, staring, etc. be a link or POSTed form, but I think that would be more resource intensive and more difficult to cache if you had to render out each possible state the comments could be in (comment x expanded or not, comment y expanded or not, both together, starred, etc.) every time something is clicked. On the positive side, commento's JS payload is pretty small. I would be up for the challenge though, because it is probably doable with no JS. The non-HN crowd won't care though

I don't think an iframe works well for the purpose of embedding universally."

Why does there need to be an iframe? Why couldn't there just be a "click here for comments" link which takes you to a separate page?

"I think that would be more resource intensive and more difficult to cache"

That might be a concern for sites that get lots of traffic, but probably for most blogs it will not be a concern at all, as the comments they will get a are few.

> Why does there need to be an iframe? Why couldn't there just be a "click here for comments" link which takes you to a separate page?

If you want to make something that replaces comment systems such as the one found in WordPress or Disqus, it needs to be embed-able in the site itself. I was imagining how best to make it look like Disqus or Commento, but work without JS. What you could do is in that iframe or whatever is have a "show comments" button and that would then load the comments, but if you only have a "click here for comments" link, why not just send commentators to reddit, HN or another social site?

"why not just send commentators to reddit, HN or another social site?"

Because I want full control of the comments, don't want my users to go to another site (because I don't control those sites, nor the comments the user leaves there, and don't want my users or their interest in my site or whatever I post to be tracked by those sites either).

The major attraction of commenting systems like this is their compatibility with static websites, but on the downside, they require JS to post to a third party site.

Someone could build a commenting system purely based on a CGI model, but then you would have to host the CGI on your server, and forward the comments to a third party service and back.

Why need a third party be involved at all?

Why can the comments just be hosted on one's own site and still not require javascript?

how that would work for static websites? let’s say I generate website from markdown files, and server (let’s say hosted on Amazon S3) does not support any backend languages. so how your suggestion would work?

To submit a comment, you could be sent to the 3rd-party commenting service, which requires a decision by user to enter comment into 3rd-party site. That site then connects to your private source code repo, generates the updated file and pushes it to S3. If your site is hosted on github, the commenting service could submit a PR to your repo, which would automatically update the site after the PR comment is merged.

It wouldn't work for static sites, but that doesn't mean you have to use javascript. As another comment in this thread pointed out, you could use server-side CGI to do it.

I agree with you on this.

I wrote Remarkbox [0] to work without the need for Javascript. Remarkbox does "power up" [1] when Javascript is enabled. This means it works for completely static sites, with or without the _need_ for Javascript.

[0] Remarkbox: https://www.remarkbox.com

[1] Capability driven Presentation: https://russell.ballestrini.net/capability-driven-presentati...

The whole idea is to use Javascript. That's what makes Disqus and co so easy to implement. You can even run it on completely static websites.

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