Simon Willison’s Weblog

Merging comments and pingbacks

5th January 2003

Tantek:

[...] we now have Trackback and Pingback to help automate generating comment hyperlinks to blog-on-blog commentary. While I certainly applaud these efforts at automating the plumbing, I must ask—why is there any distinction in the presentation? I ask because many blogs present separate and different interfaces for their comments, trackbacks, and/or pingbacks.

A comment is a comment is a comment. Why should it matter whether it was posted using a web form, sent via email, entered into a blog, or posted to Netnews? From a blog reader’s perspective, I’d just like to see a list of the comments, and not care (nor know) about how the comment got there. Presentation/interface should be designed to present the data (information), not the underlying plumbing.

Good point (besides, I’m kind of fed up of having a seperate counter for comments and pingbacks under every post). I’m sure I’ve seen a blog that combines comments, pingbacks and trackbacks in to the same interface—I think it was Sam Ruby’s and I’m sure I’ve seen it elsewhere as well. Something else to add to the list for the forever forthcoming redesign.