The issue I see with that is making it easy to embed on sites, I don't think an iframe works well for the purpose of embedding universally. I guess you could have each button for upvoting, staring, etc. be a link or POSTed form, but I think that would be more resource intensive and more difficult to cache if you had to render out each possible state the comments could be in (comment x expanded or not, comment y expanded or not, both together, starred, etc.) every time something is clicked. On the positive side, commento's JS payload is pretty small. I would be up for the challenge though, because it is probably doable with no JS. The non-HN crowd won't care though
I don't think an iframe works well for the purpose of embedding universally."
Why does there need to be an iframe? Why couldn't there just be a "click here for comments" link which takes you to a separate page?
"I think that would be more resource intensive and more difficult to cache"
That might be a concern for sites that get lots of traffic, but probably for most blogs it will not be a concern at all, as the comments they will get a are few.
> Why does there need to be an iframe? Why couldn't there just be a "click here for comments" link which takes you to a separate page?
If you want to make something that replaces comment systems such as the one found in WordPress or Disqus, it needs to be embed-able in the site itself. I was imagining how best to make it look like Disqus or Commento, but work without JS. What you could do is in that iframe or whatever is have a "show comments" button and that would then load the comments, but if you only have a "click here for comments" link, why not just send commentators to reddit, HN or another social site?
"why not just send commentators to reddit, HN or another social site?"
Because I want full control of the comments, don't want my users to go to another site (because I don't control those sites, nor the comments the user leaves there, and don't want my users or their interest in my site or whatever I post to be tracked by those sites either).
