DescentBB

I'm writing a very easy to use comment box for my friend's site. It should allow my friend to make as many comment boxes as he wants by pasting a little html into the body of his html.

A cool feature: To make a new comment box he just has to change a little text, "commentbox1", to a different name and the cgi file figures everything out on its own.

I have an example running:
[link removed]

It seems that the <object> tag does not always work in Internet Explorer.
Currently I'm trying to make a comment box system that requires very little user-side code.

This is how the comments are displayed. The "?boxname=commentbox1" is how the cgi file knows what dictionary key to reference. This way the same cgi file and database text file can be used for all the comment boxes on a website. This next part works with out any problem. It's what's used to add a new comment.

Works in IE9... but then again.

That's good.

I was thinking of having the CGI file write directly to the html file where the comment box's div layer is. That could be easier to implement.

Just a concept:

1 someone posts a comment from html file

2 python start

3 add new comment:

start=infile.find("<comments go here>")
end=infile.find("</commments>")

4 ...write commments for this page between "start" and "end", when a new comment is made..
5 /python
6 redirect user to same page

I've never seen the object tag used like this, but it sounds like it's valid. This is something one would typically use an iframe tag for, but...

Isaac wrote:I was thinking of having the CGI file write directly to the html file where the comment box's div layer is. That could be easier to implement.

This. If I understand you correctly. Make your frontpage entirely a *.cgi page and avoid the iframe stuff all together to pull in the cgi bits. Use <div style="overflow:scroll">foo</div> (or overflow:auto) over the comments to duplicate the scroll bar if that's important.

edit: Also, the usual caveats of allowing your users to post arbitrary html apply here.

One would say this could be backed by a database.

Jeff250 wrote:I've never seen the object tag used like this, but it sounds like it's valid. This is something one would typically use an iframe tag for, but...

Isaac wrote:I was thinking of having the CGI file write directly to the html file where the comment box's div layer is. That could be easier to implement.

This. If I understand you correctly. Make your frontpage entirely a *.cgi page and avoid the iframe stuff all together to pull in the cgi bits. Use <div style="overflow:scroll">foo</div> (or overflow:auto) over the comments to duplicate the scroll bar if that's important.

edit: Also, the usual caveats of allowing your users to post arbitrary html apply here.

Yeah, I agree. I had html <> brackets being replaced by empty strings "". I ended up breaking that part of the code, but I've moved on and decided to learn javascript to pass data with out refreshing the page. I think I'll end up using jquery, like you've recommended, but I think it's worth learning the basics of javascript.

Why do you need Javascript/jQuery here? Maybe there's a part of your plan I'm not grokking, but I think you're over-complicating things.

Jeff250 wrote:Why do you need Javascript/jQuery here? Maybe there's a part of your plan I'm not grokking, but I think you're over-complicating things.

I'm doing some experiments and there's a few goals I'm shooting for, all for fun. One of them is a simple chess game that runs from client A to server to client B, with out having to refresh the browser. Do I need Jquery? I don't think I do, but probably should learn more about it. I haven't started reading about what all it does yet. I will eventually.

Oh I see--yeah, there are ways you could try to get around using Javascript in that case, but Javascript is definitely the cleaner route. I thought you were talking about for your comment system.

edit: Any by Javascript, I mean to include jQuery.