[okfn-discuss] Annotation

Mon Jan 8 15:35:27 UTC 2007

This is an email I sent to Rufus following a conversation about
annotation systems.

Both of us have seen a need to get some better way of
commenting/annotating longer texts on the web.

I'm only posting it as a base for more conversation on this list.

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In short, I gave you a link to: http://stern.talusdesign.co.uk/node/27

I'm making the whole thing as a drupal module, so that anyone else
running drupal 5 will be able to install it and select what pages will
have annotation on them.  This will take all the work out of making
something like comment on power for example.  (it's not actually
working yet, but it's very close)

The whole thing should work without any javascript at all, but it does
require copy and paste, so I'm not sure how accessible that makes it.
I can't see any way of annotating text if you can't select something
though, so copy and paste isn't too much of a big step above that.
The finished thing will submit the annotation using javascript if it's
enabled.

Once an annotation is made, people will be able to comment on it,
starting something like a forum thread about that selection of text.
One of the main questions is about the display of annotations.  I
really don't like the GPL annotator that highlights the words - I feel
that it just gets in the way.
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