[okfn-help] Javascript annotation system

Fri Jul 24 09:23:12 BST 2009

2009/7/23 Nick Stenning <nick at whiteink.com>:
> Just an ever-so-brief followup on this. It turns out that properly
> "highlighting" the user's selection is not trivial, considering that
> it can and often does cross DOM element boundaries. Nonetheless, the
> code at the aforementioned repository now does that, and has a
> slightly sparklier UI to go with it.

Great stuff! I'll take a look at this asap (meant to when you sent
your first mail but was still wrestling with the hg-git plugin which
requires an update of my mercurial install)

BTW existing annotater "application" is now available as a mercurial
repo here: <https://knowledgeforge.net/okfn/annotater/>

> At the moment, I don't *think* there's any selection you can give it
> which will make it barf -- that is you should be able to highlight
> literally anything, across as many elements as you please, and when
> you click on the little note icon, the text should be highlighted.
>
> That said, I'm almost certainly wrong and would welcome anyone who
> checked out the code, fired up index.html in their browser (anything
> relatively new that isn't IE should be ok at the moment) and clicked
> about a bit. If it doesn't work, please let me know.

I'll have a play around in FF on ubuntu and see if anything breaks.

One last thing: I've been thinking that we may want to allow for
different types of reference. For example, when doing shakespeare
often users just want to record a line number or even just a scene
reference. That said I don't think this should affect the *javascript*
since any given reference format can be transformed by the backend
into the required css selectors ...

Rufus