OA in HTML (was Annotation Serializations)

Dear all,

To step back a little from generating solutions and discuss the
requirements, the first issue that I see coming from the above is as
follows:


* A simple HTML-based serialization would be valuable
  -- Embedding an annotation in a page by hitting an API and getting the
HTML back


I think we're in danger of mixing up a few topics here: UI, API and
serialization.  Is the requirement for an API that returns pre-formatted
HTML for direct inclusion into other OWP applications, or is it an HTML
serialization of the data model that will be interpreted and rendered in
some way by a User Agent, perhaps using completely different HTML?  The
former implies, but does not require, a particular look and feel, such as
"a few minutes ago" in the time part of Doug's strawman HTML.

The API providing pre-formatted HTML seems very community and situation
specific, and thus difficult to standardize directly or effectively. You
would likely not want to include the same HTML into an EPUB reading system,
as inline into a web page of the same text, or into a stream of the user's
annotations due to the different contexts in which that same annotation is
being used.  So my perspective is that while this is good background, it's
not itself a requirement that we need to address in this CG (or a potential
future WG) without vendors first coming to us with a need to interoperate
in this way. On the other hand, having a best practice for HTML serialized
annotations such that the contents are able to be understood, regardless of
the exact manner in which they were obtained, would be very valuable and
the scope is much clearer.


The use of RDFa, as Tim and Ivan discuss, is more clearly a serialization
topic -- how can RDFa be leveraged to provide a serialization in HTML that
is friendly to web developers?  This also addresses the completeness issue
that Doug brings up in his original email.  I think it would be extremely
presumptuous not to first do the full RDFa mapping and see what we can come
up with, perhaps recruiting additional expertise in the area if needed to
help us.

Then we can assess the utility and friendliness of the mapping towards
Doug's points of adoption.  It may be that the mapping is great, and hence
no need to go any further, or it may be that vendors come back and say it's
too arcane and there should be further work done. But that's for the future
to determine :)

Rob


On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 10:13 AM, dorian taylor <dorian.taylor@gmail.com>wrote:

> For what it's
>
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 9:51 AM, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote:
> > Hi, Tim, Ivan–
> >
> > Yeah, what Tim said.
> >
> > But I also think there's a broader, more straightforward rationale:
> >
> > For a vast number of use cases, possibly the majority, the consumer of an
> > annotation will see it in HTML, in the form of footnotes, comments, or
> > proper annotations (like the Annotator sidebar or stickynotes); in many
> of
> > these cases, the annotation will even be stored as HTML, or a some
> > intermediate format like markdown that is predictably transformable into
> > HTML, rather than in some abstracted form like RDF or JSON or even
> > normalized SQL. Many annotations will be only accessible as HTML, even
> > through a service's API; think of Twitter, which will let you embed a
> tweet
> > on a page by hitting their API and getting back the HTML snippet.
> >
> > So, if we think it would be desirable to be able to consume, aggregate,
> and
> > catalog those annotations, we will want to provide clear guidance for how
> > developers of annotation-producing software (e.g., microblogs, commenting
> > systems, annotation libraries, and so on) can make markup that can be
> > explicitly consumed as conforming to the OA data model.
> >
> > Regards-
> > -Doug
>
> For what it's worth, this is more or less how I intend to use OA. In
> fact, I designed this protocol:  http://doriantaylor.com/rdf-kv
> (reference implementation:
> http://search.cpan.org/dist/RDF-KV/lib/RDF/KV.pm ) with OA in mind.
>
> --
> Dorian Taylor
> Make things. Make sense.
> http://doriantaylor.com
>
>
>