[annotator-dev] What is uniquely Annotator?

Tue Jul 28 16:52:51 UTC 2015

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 8:24 PM, Michael Scharf <annotator at scharf.gr> wrote:

> Hi Benjamin,
>
>
> There are other, much  simpler libraries that can do
> highlights. e.g.
>   https://github.com/tzicatl/jquery.wrapSelection

Simpler in that they add the highlights, but I think Annotator offers other
uniqueness next to that library in that it also stores the text and xpath
ranges (or can make them available to the developer) and also (via the
Highlighter class) can do the DOM manipulation.

On the topic of DOM manipulation though, there is a hope (and some attempts
previously) to do non-DOM altering highlighting using page positioning and
SVG:
https://github.com/nickstenning/marks

A possible future for annotator is simply being the glue between user
selection events and expressing those selections as various "selectors"
(xpath, text, data, etc.) and perhaps then uses UI plugins to actually do
any DOM manipulation, browser-extension based rendering, or even WebGL
overlays, because...who knows! ;)

>
>
> Therefore, for me the core is (fuzzy) anchoring. Which
> is not part of annotator right now...
>

Great to know you need fuzzy anchoring! I know there's a few approaches to
this baked into various apps, so perhaps those devs could (eventually) work
toward extracting them as plugins.

Or, if need be, we should determine what pieces of that process needs to
actually be core to Annotator.

Regardless, if you see things Annotator isn't doing that (in your opinion)
it should be, please continue to speak up! :)

Also, if you see something it *is* doing that you understand or just
personally like, please say that too. ;)

Thanks for writing, Michael,
Benjamin

> Michael
>
>
> On 2015-07-27 22:55, Benjamin Young wrote:
>
>> If you stripped away the UI, the API, the auth plugins, etc, what would
>> remain that is unique to Annotator that does not appear in other libraries?
>>
>> I'm curious to find what the common core of JS, browser-focused
>> annotation systems is and to see if we can distill that as our core
>> deliverable in the future.
>>
>> Thanks for any and all thoughts folks can contribute.
>>
>> Cheers!
>> Benjamin
>> --
>> Developer Advocate
>> http://hypothes.is/
>>
>>
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>>
>
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