A web page moves. A comment about a broken button has to stay with that button when the page reflows or is redesigned, or it ends up pointing at a paragraph three sections down. So a comment in Commentware is attached to the element you clicked, and the dot marking it on the page is its pin.
Comments, threads and pins
A comment is one thing somebody wrote. A thread is everything written at one spot on a page, and a pin is the dot marking that spot. Leaving a comment makes a thread with one comment in it.
Mentions
A mention is stored as a reference to the person, not parsed back out of the text, which is what lets somebody be renamed without breaking every comment that names them. The consequence is that a name typed as plain text looks addressed to somebody and notifies nobody, with no error to tell you.
What a pin records
A pin is not a pair of coordinates on a page. When you leave a comment, Commentware records several independent observations of the element you clicked — where it sits in the document, what it is called, what it says, what landmark it is under — and a screenshot of the page as it was.
How a pin finds its element again
Every time you open the overlay on a page, Commentware looks for each comment’s element again and scores how far the element has changed. That change is called drift, and the pin says what it found:
| What the pin says | What happened |
|---|---|
| Still on the exact element it was left on | Nothing relevant changed. |
| The page changed slightly around this | The element is there, with some of its evidence gone. |
| The page changed around this | Found, but on weaker evidence. Worth a look. |
| Barely recognizable — this may be the wrong place | Something matched, and it may not be the right something. |
| Lost — that element is gone, so the pin sits where it was left | Nothing matched. The pin falls back to its original position. |
| Not checked on this page yet | Nobody has opened the overlay on this page since the comment was written. |
Past the second of those, the pin is drawn as drifted rather than as itself, so you can see at a glance which comments have come unstuck. There are six things a pin can say and two ways it is drawn:
A score is about the element, not about the pin’s pixels. A pin can sit exactly where you remember and still say the page changed around it, because the thing it is attached to has been rewritten.
What is kept about the page
Two things are kept beyond the screenshot:
- Up to 128 characters of the element’s opening text, which is what tells “this paragraph was edited” from “this is a different paragraph”. Without it a drifted anchor cannot tell an edit from a replacement.
- The page’s title, which is how every list of pages names a page.
Turning screenshots off for a site stops the text being kept too — the two are one question, and the screenshot is the large half of it rather than the whole. The title is kept either way, because a site with no titles would leave you with an unnavigable list rather than a smaller one. Learn more about what Commentware stores.
An agent’s pins
An agent has no browser, so a pin it places is coarser than one you placed by clicking: it places the comment against a URL rather than against an element. Learn more about what an agent cannot do.
Next steps
- Move a pin and edit its screenshot: move a pin that has come unstuck, and work with its screenshot.
- Comment on a page: leave, answer and resolve comments.