So far we have the following buttons below a comment:
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What would you think of another button
Linked From
which would take you to a page that listed all the comments that had a permalink to that comment?
There’s a lot of permalinking to past comments, but hardly any linking to future comments. I think this is just something that hasn’t evolved yet—once it did, we would find it very natural.
Would it be difficult to implement? It would involve keeping a library of all permalinks used in comments, and updating the comment’s “Linked From” page as often as it is linked to. Preferably, the button would only appear if the comment was linked to somewhere, so as not to waste time checking if the comment had been linked.
Indeed this would be difficult to implement, and furthermore I’m not convinced it’s the best choice from a UI perspective.
It would be a bit of work even to find out when a comment linked to another comment, and notify it.
This sort of thing is why Tim Berners-Lee wanted hyperlinks to be two-directional in the first place, but there are a lot of good reasons why they’re not.
This would not be that hard to implement. Each comment could have a list of linking comments. Then whenever a comment links to another, which is not hard to detect as links are already detected to support the comment markups, the list of the linked comment can be updated.
So far we have the following buttons below a comment:
Vote up
Vote down
Permalink
Report
Reply
What would you think of another button
Linked From
which would take you to a page that listed all the comments that had a permalink to that comment?
There’s a lot of permalinking to past comments, but hardly any linking to future comments. I think this is just something that hasn’t evolved yet—once it did, we would find it very natural.
Would it be difficult to implement? It would involve keeping a library of all permalinks used in comments, and updating the comment’s “Linked From” page as often as it is linked to. Preferably, the button would only appear if the comment was linked to somewhere, so as not to waste time checking if the comment had been linked.
Indeed this would be difficult to implement, and furthermore I’m not convinced it’s the best choice from a UI perspective.
It would be a bit of work even to find out when a comment linked to another comment, and notify it.
This sort of thing is why Tim Berners-Lee wanted hyperlinks to be two-directional in the first place, but there are a lot of good reasons why they’re not.
This would not be that hard to implement. Each comment could have a list of linking comments. Then whenever a comment links to another, which is not hard to detect as links are already detected to support the comment markups, the list of the linked comment can be updated.