Re: Thirdvoice White Paper

Laurent Denoue writes:
 > Jon Garfunkel wrote:
 > > They do not seem to anticipate an open client/server model, which would
 > > allow client users to pick whichever servers they want. Currently the
 > > client is stuck with using the ThirdVoice server.

This is a problem either way.  In addition to the privacy and control
problem, A single central server can't possibly serve all the
annotations for all users for all web pages.

But as soon as there are many replicas of the annotation service so
there is a chance at being scalable, users will have a problem finding
the right service to use.  This will only work if users are happy using
a few such services, such as services for workgroups, friends, or
special interests.

 > The problem not resolved by the current Web annotation systems is the
 > identification of an annotation.  They use proprietary protocols and
 > formats. So users cannot insert a link to an annotation, like they do
 > today when they insert a link to a document with its URL.  Extended
 > pointers could be a solution : Xpointers already permit the
 > identification of a phrase within a document (the anchor point of the
 > annotation). But adding extra parameters to Xpointers could be an
 > idea. Imagine an annotation encoded like this :

 > http://www.yahoo.com/#annotation=<highlighted
 > phrase>&date=19990225&comment=ok%20with%20that
...

 > But this idea brings a conceptual problem : usually the URL is made
 > to identify a resource, but here an extended URL becomes a resource
 > in itself, since it encodes other data which are not necessary to
 > identify the original resource.

I don't see a problem with identification of annotations themselves.
Certainly a system *could* avoid providing URIs for each annotation, or
make them unreusable, but the only value in doing that would be to make
it impossible to refer to a particular annotation, and I don't see any
advantage in doing that.

But perhaps you are raising a different problemd: how to make a URI for
where an annotation is attached in another resource.  Xpointers could
address this, or something like what you suggest.  


-- 
Daniel LaLiberte
liberte@w3.org

Received on Wednesday, 19 May 1999 09:14:18 UTC