Comments
28 October 2004, the wee hours
I usually promise people I will start working on various hacks or plugins for Textpattern, but then promptly forget what it was I am supposed to be doing. So, instead of working on such a request I fixed something that has been bugging me about my site, which is how comments are displayed.
Comments on my site were being displayed as ordered lists for quite some time now. The problem with this scheme is that usually the order suggested by the comments suggests connections that are not there. If you look at some of the posts here with a few comments, generally each comment does not refer to the previous comment. The ordered list suggests a linear relationship to the comments which is usually not there. Also I thought the list looked ugly.
I think ultimately I may start formatting the comments in definition lists since I think the mark-up would be neater. Till then they are being marked up with an unordered list, which seems like a reasonable way to do things.
I’ve changed the way they are displayed slightly. Opinions on the change are welcome.
Doesn’t the ordered list suggest the chronological order of the comments? The new scheme looks cool but I think it’s more than you need. Alternating colours are nice for large tables but don’t seem necessary in this context.
by mk on October 28 2004, 1:55 pm #
I think the colours and the borders do a better job of separating out each comment then the white space. They also make the comment stand out from the post itself. I think so anyway.
As for chronological order being suggested by the numbers, I suppose you are right. The fact that the comments are presented in a column suggests as much as well, numbers or not. I’m pretty sure I’m going to keep this scheme, though I may change the colours up. I need to find some I like and that match this site.
by ramanan on October 28 2004, 10:16 pm #