Comment by GhotiFish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GhotiFish | Hacker News Reader

   "Blog entries should be organized by popularity, not time. Or ideally, you can 
    pick either one. Why the hell don't blogs do that?"

Voting on good or bad articles for a blog? This is a good idea.

   "For instance, I want inline comments. Putting everyone's comments at the 
    end is pretty lame. Even worse, most blog packages these days don't even 
    seem to have Slashdot-style threaded commenting. Instead, the comments 
    are ordered chronologically, just like the entries."

Comments along the side, remarking on the story as it goes? This is a good idea.

   "And I want versions. I want to make changes to my entries sometimes -- 
    heck, frequently. But that's culturally weird, and feels dishonest to me, 
    because I've sort-of permanently overwritten the old version"

Diffs? This is a good idea.

   "All that revision-history stuff complicates the commenting, of course; each 
    comment has to keep metadata about which blog revision it was talking 
    about. It's even more complicated if you have versioned comments, so 
    users can go back and fix their typos or change their minds."

This is a good extension of the previous idea.

   "When I go into Firefox, I want to be able to override every single 
    configuration option on a per-page basis, or even better, with url pattern-
    matching rules. Doesn't that seem just patently obvious?"

... uhm. Well 4 in a row aint bad.

It's a great idea. It's called "Google Wave".

It's pretty sad that, 7 years later, all these good ideas still haven't been incorporated into any mainstream web publishing tool in a coherent way.

The closest we have to inline comments is the Google Docs interface and StackOverflow uses and exposes revisions, but neither has a self-hosted version.

As Steve identifies in his post, I think that the critically difficult part is applying versioning to multiple degrees of the content: the prima facie post itself, but also the inline comments, etc. In a sense, you'd have to have some kind of conflict resolution. Git could be an inspiration here.

Should anyone be interested in experimenting/prototyping a system like this - I'm up for a weekend hack or so. My contact information is in my profile.

I just realized that Github's pull requests UI handles this pretty well:

You can leave a comment on a particular line in the diff and the comment will be collapsed if you update the code and the diff gets outdated, but the UI will still show you the original chunk you commented on.

The suggested commenting system was sorta implemented by Microsoft a long time ago (IE5?). Internet Explorer had a plugin called "Discussions" or "Discuss" or something to that effect. It let you have comment threads on any webpage, without involving the actual site.

I'm not sure if there was a public service, or it was more of an Intranet type thing. I do recall seeing the Discuss button in IE much later then IE5, and a quick search shows plenty of people asking what it is, so it mustn't have been too obscure a feature.

Google had that too. Can't remember what it was called though.

Google Sidewiki?

There you go.

Even on the last one, once I parsed the sentence, I thought that was a good idea, too :). Configuration should run on a sort of prototype basis, where it can be specialized at any point in whatever processing chain is at work... Excuse me, I need to rewrite some code.

"When I go into Firefox, I want to be able to override every single configuration option on a per-page basis, or even better, with url pattern-matching rules. Doesn't that seem just patently obvious?"

Opera has per-site configuration options.

Better yet, when you go to modify your per-site config (right click -> edit site preferences) you can add wildcards to the site ... for example, I could turn on cookies for *.ycombinator.com

OmniWeb has per-site CSS overrides and site prefs! It's actually quite nice. That's a feature I miss.

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