about CritLink and annotation systems in general

Hello,
I like your ideas implemented in Crit, and they are really good to let any user
annotate
Web pages.
But you should also say that :
- Crit doens't work to annotate local files (only the files which Crit.org can
access to)
- Crit doens't work on frames
- it is not clear how Crit handles java applets which communicate with their
original server (since Crit cuts this)

I understand the big advance made by Crit compared to the other annotation
softwares.
But I think that the best way to integrate annotations is once the page is
loaded in the browser,
using for instance dynamic HTML and the Document Object Model.
It works like that in ThirdVoice, although I don't like the fact that you need
to send even your private
annotations to the ThirdVoice server.

In general, even if the choice of one annotation system remains to the user, I
think our biggest
problem is how we represent annotations in a standard way. So any software could
create and
understand annotation created by others.
On this subject, the W3C has proposed Xpointers, which are very good to
represent the anchor point
of the annotation in one document. Note that it can also work with HTML.

So annotations can be inserted in XML files, using a Xpointer to identify the
anchor point, and then using
XML or HTML to describe other attributes of this annotation : author, date,
language, type, comment ...
Of course, one should agree on standard attributes, and we may define a RDF
schema for annotations.

If all annotations are represented in XML or HTML files, then it's possible for
search engines to periodically
index these annotations and let people retrieve them. If you are really
concerned with the immediate availability
of your annotations, these search engines could let you post your annotations
directly, without them having to
index your pages looking for XPointers...

Let's think like that : URL embedded in current Web pages are annotations ! Why
not using the same idea, but
extending URLs with XPointers ? Everything is done, except of course the client
software needed to create and
insert annotations.

Laurent.
PS : I did Yawas, which currently works only with Internet Explorer. The
document  http://www.univ-savoie.fr/labos/syscom/Laurent.Denoue/yawas.doc is OUT
OF DATE.
It still explains my ideas about annotation systems, but forget the idea of
XURL. I think it's not an
intuitive idea.
I'm waiting a new version of Navigator which should implement DOM Level 2 : with
level 2, an external
application can dynamically modify the page displayed by the browser, like
inserting annotations or
coloring a text... Yawas uses this functionnaly of Internet Explorer.

Received on Friday, 27 August 1999 08:26:27 UTC