Was thinking a bit more about dynamic thread loading, and it seems to me that for a site like K5, it should be the preferred display method and the default if the browser supports it.
- Minimizes transmission; only transfers what’s requested, when it’s requested w/o extra page wrapping data
- Gives the additional information on reader interest that threaded mode does (extra posts are requested) without the annoying page refresh. Can be used to more accurate collaborative filtering, still more efficient than sending all posts nested or flat
- Virtually insures focus for inline loading of alerts and ads. This obviously could be used for good or evil.
Some other improvements on dynamic loading could be inserting inline loading algorithms to do preload based on hover/focus activity (or in K5’s case, the inevitable ‘dynamic’ moderation)
(can be expanded w/ inline loading algorithms based on focus, etc.).