Change Details

Phriction should have a well-defined method for adding in-line comments to wiki pages for discussion about the document, and a way to hide/show them so the document can be viewed as a document without all the comments or viewed with the comments.

**Top-Level Comments**: These are easy to add technically, but I'm concerned that old comments will quickly become stale/irrelevant because many wiki pages are very long-lived relative to other types of content. (For example, the comment section of most PHP documentation pages has a bunch of comments from 1993.) There isn't an obvious way to make sure only relevant/recent comments are shown or to deal with toplevel pages gradually becoming overgrown with discussion. Possibly we could literally show //recent// comments, or show comments against the current version of the page, wiping the slate clean after an update. Or we could just let page editors hide comments. **Inline Comments**: These are difficult/pretty-much-impossible to add technically in the way that Quip/Paper/Google Docs/Word work because we do not have a WYSIWYG editor and only see old and new versions of pages, not sequences of edits against a page. When an inline comment is on a sentence and the document is reorganized and the sentence is rewritten, we often can not reasonably keep track of it without seeing that sequence of individual mutations. Docs/Word/etc can because they see the move and rewrite as separate operations, and can keep the comment in the correct place across each small mutation. We could accept this and try anyway, but I suspect the results would be very poor. 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. We could record inlines against static text -- for example, against a specific version of a wiki document, or a specific change to a document. Perhaps this would be good enough. We could support inlines in the actual document text through an `{!inline ...}` sort of syntax, although I think this is so kludgy that I'm not inclined to pursue it. I think this can (mostly?) be implemented as an extension anyway. With top-level comments, we could provide a way to quickly quote a sentence or paragraph (say: hold shift, move cursor over paragraph/sentence, click, get quote block in comment textarea -- or long-press on mobile or something). This wouldn't be an inline, per se, but might be good enough.

Phriction should have a well-defined method for adding in-line comments to wiki pages for discussion about the document**Top-Level Comments**: These are easy to add technically, but I'm concerned that old comments will quickly become stale/irrelevant because many wiki pages are very long-lived relative to other types of content. (For example, the comment section of most PHP documentation pages has a bunch of comments from 1993.) There isn't an obvious way to make sure only relevant/recent comments are shown or to deal with toplevel pages gradually becoming overgrown with discussion. Possibly we could literally show //recent// comments, or show comments against the current version of the page, wiping the slate clean after an update. Or we could just let page editors hide comments. **Inline Comments**: These are difficult/pretty-much-impossible to add technically in the way that Quip/Paper/Google Docs/Word work because we do not have a WYSIWYG editor and only see old and new versions of pages, not sequences of edits against a page. When an inline comment is on a sentence and the document is reorganized and the sentence is rewritten, we often can not reasonably keep track of it without seeing that sequence of individual mutations. Docs/Word/etc can because they see the move and rewrite as separate operations, and can keep the comment in the correct place across each small mutation. We could accept this and try anyway, but I suspect the results would be very poor. 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. We could record inlines against static text -- for example, against a specific version of a wiki document, or a specific change to a document. Perhaps this would be good enough. We could support inlines in the actual document text through an `{!inline ...}` sort of syntax, although I think this is so kludgy that I'm not inclined to pursue it. I think this can (mostly?) be implemented as an extension anyway. With top-level comments, we could provide a way to quickly quote a sentence or paragraph (say: hold shift, move cursor over paragraph/sentence, click, get quote block in comment textarea -- or long-press on mobile or something). This wouldn't be an inline, per se, and a way to hide/show them so the document can be viewed as a document without all the comments or viewed with the commentsbut might be good enough.