Laboratory: Commenting via the Atom Protocol

I have (yet again) reimplemented comments on this blog. The twist: comments are submitted via the Atom Publishing Protocol.

Each of this blog’s individual entries has a link[@rel="replies"] that points at an APP collection that anyone can POST to. Right now, each of those collections is a subset of http://necronomicorp.com/lab/comments, which is an APP collection running on a slightly modified version of the software behind this blog.

POSTed entries get thr:in-reply-to/@ref filled in automatically, so that clients don’t need to worry about trying to figure out the proper atom:id to use.

Since I don’t expect the world to adopt this overnight, I’m using PushPin to provide a traditional HTML forms interface.

There are a few things I like about this. I can use any APP client to edit the collection, which means I don’t need to write up an interface for it. More interestingly, you can (at least in theory) read and reply to an entry without ever seeing a web page. It’s Usenet 2.0!

Some questions arise:

  • “replies” seems like the right way to point at a GETtable collection, but how do I denote that the collection is POSTable?
  • how do trackbacks fit into this?
#lab-commenting-via-the-atom-protocol ┄ 22 o’clock 24 may 2007 ┄ ∩ ∩ ∩
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