Low-tech #1 would work well for us.

Other improvements that could be done:

• auto-signing/dating with the {! ...} syntax
• the ability to select whether to hide or show the comments at the top of the document
  • The ability to select between a full comment box, a simple inline (@Cobi: Message goes here) type comment, and perhaps just an indicator that a comment exists there that could be clicked to expand into a full comment box.
• The full comment box should probably have a reply text-box so a reply to a comment can be done quickly without having to go into the remarkup.

I've attached a quick mockup of a full comment box in a phriction document.

Agree with @Cobi, this would be something our engineering & product team could really use. Ideally, the inline comments should not distract from the document. This will make wiki more subtable to collaboration and commenting. Thanks for considering.

I had an idea. We could do two versions of this, one for Frontend editing and one for document editing.

The frontend part looks exactly like Differentials' inline comments. Instead of attaching to a line we attach to a human-readable anchor though. An anchor in the document looks something like {!#comment-3 | Preview: Text is unclear, please ela... | Added 3rd Feb 2013 by @AnhNhan}. We then insert the comment like @Cobi mocked it up nicely during formatting. This way comments may be tracked in position across edits, and can be deleted by future authors, and also nicely linked (similar to D5395#inline-6128). We can probably tolerate change to some degree, recognize the anchors only by {!#comment-(?P<id>\d)(.*?)?}, the rest being for readability

Document editors, well, they use the Remarkup syntax described above. Linking may be a problem for these though, since they are not identifyable. Convert them to anchors like above?

I would make the comments a little bit more light-weight though, small floating containers on the right side for example.

Maybe also add some style variants, red blue and green ones.

can we have some kind of basic support for this please ?

We don't need inline comments. The ability to add comments to the end (like with this Task) would work for us.

inline-comment is really a good feature to have.

How about add normal comments first? Allows other users (with or without edit access) leave comments below the wiki content.

+1 for just adding normal comments at the foot of the page, below the main document content.

I've taken a pass at this in the design on Phriction v3, and it's top level comments only. The comment pane by default is hidden, but expandable. You can see comments on previous versions, and pull them up separately. I think this is a reasonable place to start over inline commenting and trying to recreate Dropbox/Quip/Google Docs, etc.

Also, re:

It's vaguely possible we could use a bunch of Javascript to try to capture the path that an edit takes and then submit it alongside the new text to track inlines, like Docs/Word do, but without implementing WYSIWYG. I suspect this would still be very complicated.

This also wouldn't work when people edit the Remarkup in another editor and just paste it into the comment box, as I do (usually via the Firefox It's All Text extension).

Consequently, I think top-level comments only makes a lot of sense technically. A quote facility to accompany it would be great.

I'm not sure how attaching comments to particular versions will work. I realise you're trying to avoid the stale comment problem. In our workflow, we often address comments in multiple updates, and of course this would make them disappear after the first update. That said, we can always keep doing what we do already and discuss in an accompanying Maniphest task. So offering something different in Phriction could be wise, as it will catch other use cases.

Did you check out the mock in Pholio?

No! I hadn't noticed it, sorry. I've had a look now and will endeavour to give some specific comments over there later. I don't think the 'addressing comments in multiple updates' will be a problem, though.

There's a separate task floating around for making Phirction changes reviewable. I think that should be separate from this task to keep things lightweight.

Jira's Confluence provides inline comments; same model could be used by Phriction. But that's not as important. Should at least have support for end-of-doc (footer) style commenting.