[xwiki-devs] [discussion] Polishing the merge between Annotations and Comments

Hello everybody, I have started testing and playing a little bit with our new features, the "merge between Annotations and Comments". I am very happy about this new feature, since this offers more flexibility and power. However, this is the initial commit and it still requires polishing in order to be ultra cool. Here are some of my suggestions after I tried to impersonate a "non technical end-user": 1) After adding an Annotation, user wants to add a reply by hovering over the yellow icon and clicking on the "Reply" button. This will move the caret at the bottom of the page, in the Comments Tab. It is a little bit confusing for the end users, which would expect an input text area to appear in the Annotation box, instead of being moved to the bottom of the page. 2) User wants to see the full thread of an annotation. He/she will hover over the yellow icon, and only the first/initial annotation will be visible. If there is at least one reply to that annotation, the user will see a link with "See thread". Clicking on the link, user will be sent in the Comments tab at the bottom of the page. An idea is to be able to see the whole thread related to that annotation in the same place, without having to be moved to the bottom of the page. Now a problem might be if the thread is really large. 3) User wants to delete the whole thread (maybe he/she wants to delete the annotation + all the threads). Clicking on the x button, only the first/actual displayed annotation will be deleted, leaving the rest of the thread/replies on the page at the bottom. IMO this would create confusion among end users and leave mess in the page objects, because users will not understand the context of the remaining comments. This behavior actually comes from Comments feature, which is keeping the replies even if the level 1 comment is deleted. 4) Clicking on the "See Thread" link, will move the user to the bottom of the page, and will highlight with yellow color the Author and Content of the first annotation only. IMO this is not very suggestive, the highlight could be useful only as a delimitation of the "starting" point of the thread, but by highlighting the content too is confusing for end users. This behavior comes from the Permalink behavior of Comments feature. 5) If we say that Annotations are merged with Comments, we can decide if we still keep them visually separated. When adding a new Annotation, in the Comments tab, you can see a small yellow icon denoting that this is an annotation. If user replies to that annotation, the second/nested annotation will be treated as a regular comment. This means only level 1 annotations are marked with the yellow sign, replies or ordinary comments aren't. This seems a little inconsistent IMO. This is not a vote, but if we decide on polishing one of these things, I will create the corresponding JIRA issues. WDYT ? Regards, Sorin B.