i tried to find some better naming for the "place your comment" and "post your reply" links and came to "react" as general solution. but i am not convinced, yet. it's just that i think the variations of "place" and "post" as well as the difference between "comment" and "reply" (or even "answer" which sounds like we are in a quiz show) should be avoided by default. if someone has a better solution, please tell it here. uh, and i also renamed "link me" to "link" because i think the usage of "me" or "my" in the user interface is always ambiguous.

webster: Synonyms react, recrudesce, recur, revert, turn back Related Word advert; revolve, rotate, turn; renew, restore; recover, regain; rebound, reflect, repercuss, reverberate Contrasted Words abandon, depart, leave, quit Antonyms forsake

I think "comment" is ok, except that it is easily misunderstood as noun instead of verb. Maybe "comment on this" or "add comment" would help this. Otherwise "reply" comes to mind, maybe also "respond". I guess "discuss" is too Manila?

re tobi's comment: Do we want to replace them with one term? I use 'comment' and 'reply' and like it that way because of the following scenario: Most users who want to post something first scroll all the way to the bottom, reading/skimming the existing comments. Then it sometimes happens that they are too lazy to scroll up again, hit the lowermost 'reply' link and accidentially put a comment on the original story into a reply to another comment. Having two different terms would help avoid this confusion.

I don't think 'react' is a good term, because in most contexts (re-)acting is largely different from talking, which is what this is actually about.

re motzes' comment: Looking up a witty definition from a dictionary, while ignoring how the term is used in the real world (above all by nativr speakers), is an extraordinarily bad idea. Particularly Webster tells you lots of interesting facts about etymology, but little about common usage (e.g. it has no example sentences like the Oxford).

In the context of a web page, 'return' would most likely be interpreted as 'go back'; furthermore, even the definition you gave above doesn't reflect the meaning we want.

re hns' comment: I like to write 'comment!' (with an exclamation mark) to make sure it's understood as a verb. Also, it's inviting users to say something instead of merely offering the possibility. What do you think?

'Discuss' at the end of an article wouldn't remind me of Manila, but of high-school group exercise instructions ("Alec Smart says that nowadays having little generators in every house would be much more efficient than a power grid, but Marty Pants thinks economical and ecological costs would outweigh the benefits. Discuss!"), which is just as bad. I'd agree we don't want that :-)

i don't like exclamation marks in the user interface as I DON'T LIKE UPPERCASE INSTRUCTIONS. i don't want to be commanded to comment a story, i want to feel invited. that's the difference caused by a simple punctuation symbol.

the problem with the distinction between comment and reply is that antville is also capable of providing one-level comments only as well as infinite-level comments: how do you call replies to replies, then? and why is a comment to a story not a reply, too?

i have had bad feelings about the two-level comment structure from the beginning and think of the three possible choices it's the worst one. so this is just some doctorin' the thread, not a fundamental solution.

anyway, to use "comment" generally would be ok with me.

Tobi, I agree 100%, my proposition works only if there is a 2-level comment structure; for anything else it's useless. I presumed that we're looking for commands for this structure, because I thought that's the only alternative we're gonna have in Antville (but being able to choose something else for a blog would be really cool!).

So, I guess the answer to my question is yes, we do look for one term. I'd say 'reply', 'comment' and 'post a comment' are pretty much equally good, it's just a matter of taste what suits a particular blog best. If I'd had to choose one, I'd take 'reply', because I find that wording most universal (commenting is almost always replying, but replying is by far not always commenting).

Now that you said it, I see how a reader could misapprehend a command with an exclamation mark (to me it's a command from me, to the computer, but I'm used to that from other places) and agree we should not do that.

Textpattern has a nice feature, btw: You can word a seperate 'comments invitation phrase' for every story, it's a part of the story editing form (so you can have 'talk back!' at the end of a particularly perky story and 'reply' below a serious one). There's only a flat reply structure below, however.

in http query strings the ampersand is used to separate two key/value pairs. it only must be escaped (ie. encoded with % following the hex code -- 26 -- and not as html entity) if it is used inside a value, e.g. ?query=waldorf%26stadler&language=en.

xhtml doesn't care for what the ampersand is used - every ampersand within an xhtml document has to be escaped.

"ampersand characters are frequently used in page addresses to carry variables, like in PHP. When coding these addresses into your XHTML, you must escape them using the entity value &. They'll be displayed as ampersand characters (&) on screen, of course." www.yourhtmlsource.com

i almost cannot believe that this works. the following two urls are almost identical just that the second one has the ampersand encoded (which is only true for the input string: actually, antville encodes both urls. so we all used & encodings in stories all the time...)

unencoded encoded

it does not make any sense to me at all but it works, at least in my browser. does it work in yours, too?

anyway, thanks for the pointer. these w3 guys sometimes appear obscure to me. (obscure as i am.)

note: rist, i deleted your reply because it referred to a former post that i removed.

and checked it in to cvs. now also validates fine with validator.w3.org.

but as a matter of fact, antville already practices this when you put a link inside a story or comment, because Helma's format() does replace & with & - meaning your two links above actually look the same (both encoded) when they hit the browser.