Webmentions work log 20200117

I hadn’t taken a close look at the IndieWeb comments documentation when I marked up the latest version of comments for this site last week. Today I’m going to follow some of the advice Chris had and stare closer at some prior art.

My first objective is to remove all of the unnecessary classes added to comments by WordPress through comment_class(). To aid in helpful front-end styling, things like odd, even, bypostauthor, and a handful of others are automatically added. I’m doing anything fancy, so I removed pretty much everything and went with a default of class="u-comment h-cite".

Much of the markup around this has things like u-like and u-url and h-cite and I knew there had to be some reasoning, but hadn’t bothered to actually dig in to what it all means. Today I found the documentation for microformat prefixes and everything makes a lot more sense. Go figure.

This list is mostly a reproduction of the one on that page.

• h- for root class names like h-entry or h-cite
• u- for URL class names like u-url. This makes the least immediate sense to me because I’m putting things like u-like and u-mention at the <article> level rather the URLs it wraps, though that might be the intention—this container has URLs.
• dt- for datetime properties, which I use on the <time> element.
• p- for plain text.
• e- for element tree properties, or basically: contains HTML.

I’m happy I spent some time actually staring at this. I’ve been “familiar” in the sense that I’ve used the markup for years, but I haven’t paid close enough attention to things like p- and e- prefixes.

My initial version of comments had the comment text wrapped in a .comment-content container. I first switched that with .p-content today before reading the prefix spec. Because I made the decision to add paragraph markup to webmention content and allow things like URLs, I decided .e-content would be the most accurate fit and switched things again.

I then noticed a comment by Tantek on the IndieWeb comments page saying that .h-entry is probably better for comments written on the actual site while .h-cite is best for comments that have a canonical location elsewhere. I went ahead and added a detection for “standard” comments and injected .h-entry for those.

WordPress’s comment type detection is um, yeah.

The comment_type column can be empty, “pingback”, or “trackback” by default. I think this column alone is probably the most annoying thing about even starting with comment types. I left a comment on the associated ticket along those lines.

For now I assume comments that have no comment_type and have a meta key of protocol with the value webmention as added by the webmention plugin are in fact webmentions. Those use .h-cite and other comments with an empty comment_type use .h-entry.

Things are looking a bit cleaner in the source now, or at least making a bit more sense. I’m going to ship that and head over to watch some basketball and stew on why college athletics don’t have URLs to individual events. 🙄

I’ll plan on creating a post type this weekend that I can use for dedicated replies and likes. Sounds like a party. 🎉