Hacker News Reader

Comment by FraaJad | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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...

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com