[annotator-dev] colored notes

Tue Jan 14 16:58:34 UTC 2014

Hi,

I know Riccardo and Rob responded further, but I'll comment further on 
my specific project/use.

On 01/14/2014 10:49 AM, Dan Whaley wrote:
> In this case, I think the question is something like this:  From your perspective, is it necessary that there are distinctive colors or other stylings from a pallete and that the same color/effect, with respect to the other colors/effects, is aligned on the same annotation persistently.  In other words, here are some colors, we’re using them to more easily tell annotations and categories of annotations apart from eachother, but any colors will do— just don’t mix them up, and keep using the same one once it’s been picked.
>
> Or is it important that the specific pink color, Pantone #454 (i’m making that up), is applied, and that this same specific color be represented wherever the annotation is shown, and by whatever rendering software.

For my particular project, we have a specific set of ~20 colors that are 
allowed to be used. A color is tied to a keyword/tag. Once the color has 
been used out of the 20 colors, it shows as inactive and is not allowed 
to be used for subsequent tags. Once all 20 colors are used, there are 
no restrictions applied on what colors can be used, simply because it 
would be an extremely unusual use case where 20 colors/tags have been 
applied to a single piece of content.

Our current live site uses custom functionality other than the 
annotator, and before we limited to 20 colors, we allowed the user to 
enter the hex only. However, the reason we limited to 20 colors is for 
usability - we didn't want to rely on user input (ie error) for color 
selection.

On our case, the colors persist through all rendering mediums. That is a 
very important feature for our particular use, and I have a hard time 
seeing how one medium displaying a red strikethrough would be displayed 
as a generic highlight in another medium would make usability sense, 
unless there is clear communication on the user interface as to why the 
annotation rendering is different across these mediums.

Steph