Re: Annotations futures

John Danner (jdanner@us.oracle.com)
Mon, 9 Aug 93 15:31:49 PDT

I haven't been following this discussion at all, but using character-offsets
seems like a pretty weak mechanism for marking annotation positions when
you have the SGML structure of a document lying around. Saving the
structure information with the annotation will give you a much better chance
of recovery when a document is revised. Our experience on Oracle Book, a
commercial hypertext system, is that except for electronic review situations,
authors will not take responsibility for repositioning annotations.
We currently use only character-offsets, but are moving towards storage of
SGML structure in future versions.

John Danner
Project Leader
Oracle Book

>From daemon@nxoc01.cern.ch Mon Aug 9 15:18:20 1993
>To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
>Subject: Annotations futures
>
>Might I suggest the following system for public annotations?
>
>-- User annotates document, client offers it to original server with
> ANNOTATE method or somesuch, and tells the server how long
> the annotation is
>-- Server can accept the annotation, and the next time the document
> is retrieved, the annotation is noted at the bottom.
>-- Server can refuse the annotation, in which case, it is
> offered to an annotation server (ugh).
>
>Annotating on the server would mean that character-offsets could be
>used and preserved across revisions (the author would either
>incorporate, delete or move the annotations as need be).
>
>Sound fun? Who's going to implement it?
>
>Nat
>