Comments on a Separate Page?

Published 15 December 04 by Justin French, 28 comments

Everything from SimpleBits to PHP.net does it, and obviously over time the page size, download times, rendering times and page length can get quite out of control.

There are some 80–120kb pages (plus images and other resources) in the archives of popular weblogs like Signal vs Noise, Whitespace and Design by Fire – surely this is pushing the limits of what is an acceptable page size.

[Let’s not even link to that 476k monster on SixApart’s weblog!]

Then there’s Dave Shae at Mezzoblue, who has his comments published on an entirely separate page linked from the main article, and I like it. Dave’s reasoning makes perfect sense to me:

I’m choosing to keep a degree of separation between the original article and the comments that go along with it. This is no bandwidth issue, it’s about perception and managability. Though I’m not opposed to a gentle shift off-topic provided there’s value in the discussion, when a web standards primer aiming to wean absolute beginners off of tables starts bandying about the phrase ‘MIME type’, we have a problem; one example, but more exist.

I’m yet to see another site follow Dave’s lead, but if you know of any other sites doing this, please link to them in the comments.

Likewise, if you have any strong feelings for or against this approach, please speak up now, because I’m leaning towards the separation.