[development] One-to-one tables considered harmful

[Chris Johnson]

On 6/4/07, Earnie Boyd <earnie at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> I have been reading the posts and wondering what is so different about
> a comment.  A comment is nothing more than content very much similar to
> a node.

Well, not quite.  There is one very distinct difference that makes a
comment very different from nodes as we treat them today.  And it's
also the one thing that makes it hard to clearly call a comment a
first-class object, in a modeling sense.

That difference is:

* nodes are "new" objects.  They "start" or "instantiate" a piece of
content.  They are independent, typically.

* comments are "follow on" objects.  They are a "reaction" to a piece
of content.  They are *always* dependent upon the node to which they
refer.

So much for the model.  In a practical implementation sense, the
questions are different, but need to keep the model in mind.