After reading a post by Titus Brown I got to thinking about documentation and comments again. People constantly ask that Python documentation have a comment system similar to PHP's. It's also a recurring theme for myself, and I have long meant to write something for collecting such comments; in fact the first web application of any size that I wrote was a system for collecting comments from article contributors at a publishing house.

Anyway, I've always been frustrated by the UI available for comments. My original app stuck little links at the end of every sentence -- useful for that situation, but rather intrusive. Ka-Ping Yee's crit.org (a site which passed away, the domain now reused for something unrelated) had the user select text and used simple text matching to determine where to insert the comment. Backtalk uses quite intrusive links. So last time around I got kind of discouraged by this form of interaction. I don't know what the state of the art is these days, but it wasn't that great at the time.

But we're in this new Ajax world now (where Ajax can primarily be read to mean "Javascript now works") and I thought I should give it another go. A week later, after some manic coding and mostly ignoring my other projects, I have an app...

The app is called Commentary. You double-click on an element to leave a comment on it. Right now I want to focus purely on the use case of leaving comments on technical documentation. Based on this it writes to simple flat files which can be committed to a repository and edited both on- and off-line.

Besides the Commentary site itself, you can also comment on the SQLObject site including of course its documentation. I welcome feedback, particularly in the form of tickets.