alt Hacker NewsI've thought for a decade or more that "discussion" should be an HTML element, with the view format user-selectable. Threaded, flat, time-ordered, collapsed, and/or ranked by votes would all be handy. An interactive filter-by-keyword would also be useful, in which a thread would expand only comments matching the current search, with other context expandable. This is more useful than search-in-page (all the irrelevant content remains visible), and permits expanding a subthread as needed to see where a discussion goes.
The ability to apply one's own weighting / ranking preferences might also be useful, downweighting tired terms, phrases, or posters, upweighting others, including the option of killing these entirely.
Usenet, effectively ;-)
Though as noted, how most people see a discussion will tend to dominate its overall dynamic: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760193>.
Some html tags for things people actually do online would be a game changer.
Content editable is as old as Rome but obvious things are still missing like a rich text input area with the obvious options like italic and bold. But why not a <quote> with some sensible attributes. And <code type="text/php"> with highlighting.
It would also be sensible to have standardized forms that the webmaster can't modify in any way.
You could also have an <index> that points at a json. Blogspot use to have tags like that. Something like:
Then the title tag is replaced by the "title": from the json. Could have a pagination tag too. Need to flesh out things like requesting the next json when one gets to the end. Not impossible.Perhaps there is even room for commercial post ranking solutions.