Make comment count & link for crossposted entries reciprocal

[cimorene]

Title:
Make comment count & link for crossposted entries reciprocal

Area:
interoperability, entries

Summary:
Place a link (with comment count) at the bottom of the original DW entry to its crossposted mirror.

Description:
Right now we have the option to include a link back to the original DW entry on crossposted versions of it, displaying the number of comments at the original entry. Any readers of the mirror journal will know if they are missing any discussion at DW, but DW readers don't currently know if they are missing part of the discussion at the mirror location.

I'd like to be able to generate a copy of that notice/comment count that would include the address of the cross-posted entry and a comment count for it, and place it on the original DW version of the entry so that both copies would link to each other.

Drawbacks:

If the same entry is crossposted to more than 1 other site, the number of links could eventually start to become unwieldy.

It would require another step after completed crossposting to modify the original entry on DW with the link.

Poll #1575 Make comment count & link for crossposted entries reciprocal

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 46

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
28 (60.9%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
6 (13.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
5 (10.9%)

(I have no opinion)
7 (15.2%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[gusl]

why is it implemented as an image at all? it would be better to do transclusion of the number as plain text.

[matgb]

OK, a word I don't know. *googles*

Wikipedia says:

At present[update], transclusion in HTML is somewhat limited by lack of standards support in web browsers. Although all graphical browsers can transclude an image, including a document is a bit more difficult. There are currently two methods of achieving this result:

It's a dynamic bit of information that changes quickly. It needs to be esported in a format that's completely readable by all browsers in pure HTML so that it shows up on whatever other site it ends up on.

If that's possible, great, but I know of no standards compliant way of doing it without using an image.

[gusl]

I want to bitch at the HTML standard. Why support transclusion of images but not text?!

Another idea is to do server-side transclusion, which would mean that the blog HTML gets served after transcluding the text... but this might be too much to ask for.

I'm curious about the Ajax solution mentioned on the Wikipedia article.

[matgb]

For the first, simple answer. I can't type an image, so they had to figure out a way of including them, if you saying "include this image on my server" making that so it's "include this image on any server" is easy.

But there's no pressing need to grab text from elsewhere, as you're already creating text here. Thus images were put in ages back (probably for porn), but text, being already there, wasn't.

That we now have many uses for it above and beyond what the initial idea was, makes it regrettable, but there're people working on solutions somewhere, probably, and it's way beyond my ken.

[denise]

The problem with all of that is that LJ-based sites (which is where most of the crossposting is going) doesn't permit entries to contain AJAX, iframes, or the object tag, for safety and security reasons, which means that none of the methods work. :(