Blogger [[Derek Sivers]] has a surprisingly novel approach to handling comments on his website (see source). The thing that's surprising about it is that it **is** novel, when in reality it feels like the obvious thing to do. # Simplified Approach Descriptions ## Traditional, Typical Comment Setup 1. User Loads page 2. Page loads, **separate request** to dynamically load comments is fired off 1. Comments load separately 3. User submits comment 4. Comment inserted into database ## Static HTML Comments 1. User loads page 2. Entire page is loaded statically, comments and all 3. User submits new comment 4. Comment appended to the static page on the backend # Pros & Cons of a Static Approach I'm theorizing here, not actually done this [[Empirical]]ly. ## Benefits 1. The [[Static Site Generator|static]] approach is [[Simplicity|simpler]] 2. Pages can be sent all at once, which can be faster 3. Moderation can be done collocated with the page content ## Cons 1. Pagination would be difficult, if you had a ton of comments you'd have to handle that 2. You would _always_ be sending the comments along with the page, even if the user didn't move the scroll view down far enough to trigger things in a dynamic setup # **** # More ## Source - https://sive.rs/shc ## Related