RE: Search engines vs. annotations

Danny,
I'm not suggested to embed the annotation in the ORIGINAL document!
I'm only suggesting to embed annotations within existing web page.

The first step to do this would be that annotation servers give you a URL
for each annotation,
so you might safely embed it into your Web pages like this:
<a href="http://annotea.w3c.org/?command=get_annotation&id=1254wssdf">my
annotation</a>

Of course, this means that:
- everyone has access to an annotation server to create new annotations
- everyone trusts the web server (the server knows what you annotate)
- people accessing your annotations need to access the server, so they ALSO
need to trust the server
- the server needs to be running

So I was suggesting the second way: using "extended URLs" to encode the
annotation itself:
- the document it annotates (url)
- the anchor point in this document
- possibly the date, author, comment
<a
href="http://www.w3c.org?anchor=word1+word2+...&author=denoue&comment=good+t
hing">my comment</a>

To create such standalone annotations, you don't need an annotation server.
Everyone
can create its own annotations and embed them in their web pages.

It's like creating a hyperlink: would you like to have to use a third-party
server
every time you needed to link to a particular page?

Same thing with annotations...

The third step then is to have a search engine (like today's annotation
server) which
crawls the web and identifies annotations, make them searchable, ... like
annotea does today.

But I think we missed the first two steps!
Laurent.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Danny Ayers [mailto:danny666@virgilio.it]
> Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2002 4:17 PM
> To: www-annotation@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Search engines vs. annotations
> 
> 
> 
> >I personnaly like the 3rd solution: it lets users embed
> >annotations in their
> >current web pages: annotations
> >do not have to be stored on a server or in a separate 
> annotation file.
> 
> Strange, the ability to create an annotation which can be 
> associated with a
> page without having to be embedded or linked has always 
> struck me as the key
> benefit of Annotea etc.
> 
> Cheers,
> Danny.
>