Re: Bringing annotation to the browser

On Wed, May 26, 2021 at 9:50 PM, David Bokan <bokan@chromium.org> wrote:

> Hi Gerben,
>
>
>
>> Consequently, I think the first item+subitems in your list of challenges
>> are problematic:
>>
>> “Decentralized moderation: Whose responsibility is this? …”
>>
>> We could just as well ask: who moderates the WWW? That seems the wrong
>> question. Boldly put: *If the annotation system requires a moderation
>> system, it is a bad system.* The challenge should be how not to need
>> moderation; otherwise it is doomed to fail — probably even before
>> launching, it will be killed by a storm of criticism and bad publicity
>> (harassment, disinfo and social media’s moderation failures are hot topics
>> these days).
>>
>> +1. IMHO, the browser is infrastructure and the wrong place to be
> applying moderation in this way, it should be left to the services that
> host the content to moderate it. The one caveat here is for
> narrowly-defined security/safety related issues, akin to how browsers
> today soft-block behavior on SafeBrowsing lists. Given that annotations
> are much less flexible than regular content I don't expect this to be an
> issue but the baddies are creative.
>

Totally agree.


> There is a broader point here though, and "moderation" is probably the
> wrong word, but we must consider all the various ways this could be used
> harmfully and make sure that we design the system and user agents
> to disincentivize and minimize toxic behavior.
>

Yes!


>> I would therefore strongly consider limiting the design and discussion to
>> ] and use cases that do not pull annotations from just anywhere & anyone,
>> but only get annotations the reader asked for:
>>
>>    - Personal private notes — stored in your browser, much like bookmarks
>>    - Sharing a document+annotations — e.g. I add notes to a page and
>>    share the annotated page with you. (technically, perhaps I point you to a
>>    collection of Annotations targeting the same document; your browser renders
>>    its target document while showing the annotations besides it)
>>    - Group collaboration — a group’s annotates a specific document
>>    (Google Docs-style but for any web page)
>>    - Pulling notes from sources one explicitly follows (I call this the
>>    “Twitter/RSS feed model” to annotiation — imagine seeing annotations from,
>>    or boosted by, people & organisations you follow — and only those people)
>>
>> Incidentally, the order of this list is how I see the progression of use
> cases in terms of risk and complexity. I mentioned in the explainer that
> one of the principles we're adhering to is "Incremental, careful progress"
> - it's likely we'd want to add capabilities gradually, in this order, to
> tackle some of the low-hanging fruit first and get experience and feedback
> and see how users react and interact with it.
>

Makes sense.


The last option of these sounds similar to your concept of “Annotation
>> Sources”. Note however that this may create a huge problem for reader
>> privacy, as a query for annotations is made to every annotation source upon
>> every page you visit (while having annotations enabled). The only solution
>> I can think of is that the browser (or a delegated service) retrieves
>> *all* annotations from sources it follows and stores them locally, to
>> not reveal which pages it visits.
>>
>>
> +1. I think there's a lot of value to this use case but it's also the most
> challenging for the reasons you mention.
>
>> *Publisher’s control*
>>
>> “Authors should have some control over which annotations can be shown (at
>> least by default) when their page is being viewed.
>> …
>> This mechanism should give control to pages over third-party annotations
>> on their content, but it shouldn’t limit what a user can do and see on
>> their own device.”
>>
>> I suppose some concerns of authors may come up, and compromises could be
>> made (e.g. a page could *hint* to disable annotation), but as you write
>> in some points in the explainer this is ultimately a front-end feature that
>> users should control. If the graffiti concerns are avoided as just
>> described, then one could argue that *every* annotation is something the
>> user does and sees on their own device.
>>
>> This is where I think it's important that we design the defaults
> correctly - if a user consciously indicates that they want to see
> annotations then the author shouldn't be able to override that, but I
> expect that in many cases users won't be able to make that decision. My
> initial expectation is the author controls would be along the lines
> of hinting relating to initial appearance and some styling controls to let
> pages make sure things like selector highlights match the page theme.
> However, I expect this will be a contentious area.
>

Agree.  Adding the notion that hints could include styling suggestions is a
really interesting one.  Its one of our most frequent requests from folks
that want to embed Hypothesis tech in their pages, and we've provided some
basic support for it.  That said— users should be able to override.


>> If the annotations are public, then the web page can already fetch and
>> display them without the browser’s aid; like a website can already load a
>> hypothesis sidebar. I think the main point of web annotation is to view the
>> web beyond&between the web pages themselves, without requiring the
>> cooperation of those pages. So unless I miss something, I think this whole
>> idea of involving the page in helping to annotate itself may best be
>> forgotten about completely.
>>
>> I think I've mostly come around to the same conclusion. I think there's
> cases where pages may want to ingest annotation data but I'm not sure the
> user agent needs to be involved in those cases.
>

Good point.

One way in which pages can however help the browser in showing annotations
>> on the page: using good semantic html, specifying canonical and alternate
>> URLs, using rel=bookmark
>> links in <article>
>> s, and so forth. This helps the browser to know which document(s) it is
>> looking at — a point I do not see being mentioned in your explainer (many
>> documents may appear under numerous URLs; e.g. sometimes query parameters
>> matter, sometimes they do not).
>>
>> +1 thanks for pointing this out.
>
>> (also, another challenge not mentioned in the explainer: the web lacks
>> versioning or history, hence annotations can become ‘orphaned’)
>>
>> +1, I've been thinking about this. I've noticed this as a major issue
> with existing annotation tools - aggregator pages and feeds suffer from
> this the most where the page changes rapidly and is customized to the user.
> Maybe pages need a way to mark themselves as "frequently changing" (I think
> this could be useful in other ways)?
>

Yes, or as a certain kind of page like "news feed" etc.  (One could imagine
people purposefully mis-characterizing their pages to discourage user
agents of course :)

Or have more granular ways of referencing particular items (as you mention
> above). Agree this needs more thought.
>
>> *Web platform*
>>
>> I really like you are thinking how to make annotation part of “the web
>> platform”, and that you are looking at web standards to implement. It would
>> indeed be sad if this ends up being just a feature specific to Chromium (I
>> hope Text Fragments gets wider adoption too). It needs a whole ecosystem
>> around it (annotation publication software, annotation sources, …), that
>> would ideally include existing annotation projects. It would be great if
>> the millions of annotations made in Hypothesis and elsewhere could be
>> displayed in the browser too. To get the relevant parties to discuss this,
>> perhaps we can liven up the discussion in the W3C Open Annotation
>> Community Group <https://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/> again?
>>
>> IMHO, if this ends up Chrome- (or even Chromium-) only then we will not
> have succeeded (similarly for text fragments) - after all, you can't know
> what user agent someone on the other end of a link will be using. But,
> changing an ecosystem as big as teh web takes time. Broader annotation
> would be a really big change to the web and feels like a really fundamental
> piece of what makes the web...webby...so I think building things out to be
> open and extensible is the right approach. I'll certainly continue to
> solicit feedback and do the work out in the open (here, in my GitHub,
> eventually in WICG hopefully) and welcome contribution and collaboration.
> I'd like to follow a similar model to the text fragment work where (IMHO)
> we did a decent job of being transparent and collaborative; certainly I can
> think of some mistakes we made along that way but I'd like to think we can
> apply lessons learned.
>

I'll just say again here how much I appreciate the way you're going about
this.  It's really awesome.


>> As an overarching thought, I think the main questions this explainer
>> provokes are not technical, but rather about the goal and the process
>> towards it. Will the concept be developed by engineers, or with rounds of
>> user research and feedback?  Will this be a collaborative effort to change
>> the web at large, or Google using its dominant browser to push a feature
>> through and wait for others to follow? Will it end up being a single
>> product experience, or a framework that enables many browsers, browser
>> extensions, publishers, CMSes and other parties to try out a variety of
>> annotation(-ish) systems and use cases? I guess you might not have the
>> answers ready either, but I am curious how you plan to go about.
>>
>> The explainer is intentionally vague on technical details because...we
> don't have any yet :). This is still very early in the process for what we
> want to do (and I can't promise we'll still be around in 4 months).
> Internally, we're still figuring out what we want and can build, hopefully
> we'll have something more technical to share soon. That said, personally,
> I'd like to make sure anything we build is on an open infrastructure so
> that it works across a variety of user agents and can be used and extended
> in new ways.
>

Yay


>> As said, I would be curious to hear the thoughts from others in this
>> group. Is the interest in web annotation from Chromium developers (even if
>> coming ‘late to the party’) an opportunity for web annotation? Or a
>> hopeless/misguided mission? Or…?
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>> — Gerben
>>
> Thanks!
> David
>
>>
>>