Long, often wide-ranging comment threads were peppered with interactions both fierce and friendly, and predictable skirmishes between right and left were – whilst not civil in the strict sense of the word – more civil than could be expected

I was always bemused by the one or two commenters who would always claim LP was a hivemind of homogenised leftists always on song. I’d think, dude, have you actually read this thing?

I’m not particularly interested in jquery’s plethora of animated components on offer.

More the efficient transfer of information – markup and css sent once, data to follow as plain xml, stripped back as bare as is practical…that kind of thing.

As for the jquery/ajax niftiness, I’m a bit leery of too much bling there. It’s very easy to overdo.

1) the extra stress it puts on the browser’s rendering engine – though this is perhaps largely a non-issue now. I’m still using the same laptop I was using in 2007…back then, long LP comments (300+) used to cause all sorts of locking up and strife, but pretty much all the major browsers appear to have improved their act in that regard…

2) your browser’s default scrolling speed needs to be up to scratch to deal with long threads…my laptop is fine, new-gen Samsung phones and tablets are exceptionally good…iPhones were hopelessly slow last time I looked, can’t speak for iPads…but definitely room for coding your own scrolling routines rather than relying on browser defaults (see facebook for examples).

3) load time. This is the big one for me…especially if I’m on a bus and my reception is a bit crappy, a 300+ comment thread can take a minute or more to load in full and before its ready events fire etc. Lots of room here for coding more efficient data buffering back to the user. Again, facebook does this pretty well…scroll down further to load older posts etc. Problem with LP is that comments are always oldest to newest (preferred, better for discussion), so it can’t quite work the same way. Nevertheless, it could still be improved a lot through more nifty jquery/ajax. It’s bad practice to combine such heavy data loading (eg: last LP thread is 1.5MB so far) into the initial document load-display cycle.

Generally, I think Guy’s right…and as the tablet browsers begin to dominate in the next year or two, group blog useability really is going to have to keep up with major news companies who’ve already heavily invested in being ready for this, and group blogs will risk looking more and more clumsy and outdated if they don’t. Not so important on a personal blog of course, but very much so on an LP, imo. Look and feel isn’t everything by a long shot…but I’d still prefer blogs be seen on the innovative leader side of the fence, instead of the lagging follower…

It’s one of those strong preference things where you’re never going to find a solution that satisfies everybody, methinks.

It would be good to allow commenters to jump easily between their various conversations – though this would imply commenter registration.