Also, thank you for using my plugin! :)

First, I can’t post a reply to anyone if I have the page sorted by most diggs (which I usually do). However, I could understand that comments could be taken out of context in this sense.

I’m also no big fan of clipping the comments at the end of the page, there should really be an option for this.

Readability of the comments page would improve if responses were indented one level instead of completely boxed.

|Person 1 says
| yadayadayadayada
| __________________
| |1 reply to Person 1
| | ________________
| | |Person 2 says
| | | yabbadabbadoo
| | |________________
| |Reply to person 1
| |__________________
|____________________

vs.

|Person 1 says |
| yadayadyadayada |
| reply |
. |Person 2 says |
. | yabbadabbadoo |
. | reply |

Which one looks easier to read?

These two styles look similar to these pages of the GNOME HIG v2:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/controls-frames.html
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/design-window.html

I wrote the first DOM creation plugin for jQuery, but I no longer use it much, nor any of the other DOM creation plugins that have come along since then. innerHTML is so much faster that there’s no comparison. I use [].join(”) to generate the HTML code - it is very fast and the code is readable too, e.g.

var url = ‘http://example.com/’;
var html = [
”,
‘‘,
‘My Link’,
‘‘,
”
].join(”);

Let’s hope that the comment system keeps the formatting in that code (fat chance?). :-)

(1) I think it’s interesting that you’ve chosen not to provide an alternative for users with Javascript turned off — hiding information from users who choose to do so is considered a “no no” by the web standards and accessbility police. I think the biggest problem is probably for users who use screen readers. When/how was the choice made to *not* degrade the site gracefully?

(2) Kudus for “eating your own dog food” and using your public APIs and library. I’m working on a project at my own gig where we’ve taken this approach. We’re actually co-developing a public API and an app that implements much of it, and it is helping us make good choices about how to design the API.

(3) How big a benefit do you think you get by generating the DOM on the fly vs. using an approach like jhaddad suggests and generating and returning the rendered HTML instead of the JSON? It seems to me the former approach is a little easier maintain and I’d only take the latter approach if the UX benefit (or bandwidth costs) associated where significant…

http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/innerhtml.html