Hacker News Reader

Comment by scribu | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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a comment on a particular line in the diff and the comment will be collapsed if you update the code and the diff gets outdated, but the UI will still show you the original chunk you commented on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com