The distinction between what gets presented (and syndicated etc.) as an article and what gets presented (and syndicated etc.) as a note is not necessarily clear. This page is to collect various ideas about what that distinction means in reality.
Formal distinctions (in specifications)
TODO: list what specifications like ActivityStreams etc. say about the distinction between an article and a note.
Personal, subjective distinctions
- Tom Morris: for me, it's "could I plausibly have written this on an iPad?" if yes, it's a note. if not, it's an article.
- Tantek:
biggest distinction between article/note is the presence/absence of a post name/title.
the only useful distinction I've found between article and note is - does it have non-trivial structure and/or is it worth naming? if so, then article, else note
also, is it just plain text? then likely a note. as soon as you start writing/pasting markup, even just an iframe, your post is now leaning towards being an article.
implicit markup rather than explicit markup. implicit = autolinking/embedding when displaying a note rather than explicit <a href> / <iframe> / <img> markup in an article.
- Brennan Novak: I agree with Tom, so long as "written... on an iPad" refers to the length of a an article, which "shorter" is more in the spirit of how I see Notes developing. I absolutely agree with Tantek about Notes not having a title. I also think a huge difference is that Articles embed HTML content (pictures, audio, or video) directly in the body of the Article whereas Notes (as on Twitter, Facebook, App.net) only ever have URL's, @useranmes, and #hashtags are inside the body of the Note they are not rendered as interactive HTML elements in the transport themselves. Thus, processing or parsing of a @username is up to the platform pub/sub'ing the Note, whereas with an Article, RSS transports raw HTML that's then rendered as such. I am leaning towards Notes (like email) having attachments which can be any type of custom HTML or Non HTML content. See example email style note attachment
Posts
See Also
