Annotation Serializations

Hi, folks–

The work this group has done so far is excellent. I think the data model 
is really solid. I'd like to see it applied broadly, not just for 
annotations proper, but also for comments, footnotes, bookmarks, and 
other similar things along the same lines.

And I'd like annotations to be supported by browsers natively; I think 
that would dramatically increase their usage and usability.

To that end, I'd like to introduce a few topics that I think can build 
on the data model, and couch it in terms that the average web developer 
can easily understand and apply, and which browser vendors might get behind.

The first of these is some suggestions on different serializations, for 
those who aren't interested in the RDF aspects (yes, hard to believe, 
but such people do exist!).

Here's a (terrible, almost certainly incorrect) strawman for an HTML 
serialization of an annotation (consider it the bastard child of 
OpenAnnotation and Twitter):

<aside vocab="http://www.w3.org/ns/oa#">
    <p>
      <a property="annotatedBy"
          href="http://example.com/people/shepazu"
          typeof="Person">
         <span property="name">Shepazu</span>
       </a>
    </p>

    <time property="annotatedAt" datetime="2014-01-14T01:28:22-0500">
      <a href="http://example.com/annotations/shepazu-1389680902"
         title="1:28 AM - 14 Jan 2014">A few minutes ago</a>
    </time>

    <blockquote property="hasTarget"
                cite="http://example.com/sourcedoc.html"
                data-prefix="essential feature of the memex. "
                data-suffix=" When the user is building a tra">
      <p>The process of tying two items together is the important thing.</p>
      <footer>
        – <cite>
          <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush"
             typeof="Person">
              <span property="name">Vannevar Bush</span>
          </a>
          </cite>
      </footer>
    </blockquote>

    <p property="hasBody">Annotations are at the Web’s core.</p>

     <ul>
       <li property="tag">annotations</li>
       <li property="tag">web</li>
       <li property="tag">standards</li>
     </ul>
  </aside>


Another serialization could be in very lightweight JSON, for sockets 
interchange.

All of these serializations should be defined in such a way that they 
are losslessly transformable into any of the other serializations; any 
missing data (for example, values omitted for brevity) should have 
default (or lacunae) values that are populated for other serializations 
that might need them, such as RDF.

Thoughts?


Regards-
-Doug

Received on Saturday, 18 January 2014 23:29:10 UTC