Re: Control on the right to create annotation

Just some quick thoughts...

Annotation is often most useful on material that scared (or "scary") 
webmasters don't want annotated.  This makes forcing the annotation server 
to be a subservice of the Web server to be problematic at best.

Since content selection (like PICS) and annotation are closely related 
services it might perhaps be better to look at having annotation service 
bureaus, like the label service bureaus of PICS.  Although this does not 
guarantee that a user would always be able to retrieve the annotations for a 
given URL, it does decentralize annotation services, making them able to 
scale much better.  Just as the World-Wide Web would not have been possible 
if the whole Web needed to be contained in a single server or set of 
servers, annotations cannot take off unless they mimic the web pages they 
annotate by having a distributed, transparent, and 
not-necessarily-fault-tolerant architecture.

The big fault of the Dexter hypertext model is that it requires that all 
hypertext links can be reached at any time.  This requires a centralized 
architecture that is incompatible both technically and politically with 
world-wide distributed systems like the Web and like annotations should be. 
 Perhaps Tim Berners-Lee's greatest idea in creating the Web was that it was 
OK that a link might occasionally be down or could actually die off without 
crashing the Web.  A similar principle should apply to annotations.
======================================================================
Mark Leighton Fisher                   Thomson Consumer Electronics
fisherm@indy.tce.com                   Indianapolis, IN

Received on Friday, 30 August 1996 11:35:22 UTC